Yesterday, after spending a few hours researching, I made a little bit of an impulse decision and purchased a Samsung Navibot SR855 (a robotic vacuum cleaner). I figured that since I don’t like hoovering (and neither does my girlfriend), this could be the ‘ultimate’ gadget purchase that both of us can enjoy. Needless to say, at £338, my girlfriend wasn’t particularly impressed when I first broke the news.

Navibot's self-charging dock

“But we need one, darling!”

Naturally, the first thing you have to do after any impulse purchase is convince other people that you had a good reason for doing so, and that what you’ve bought will actually be suitable. At least, someone with my reputation for buying just about anything that has a plug on it has to anyway!

Hoovering isn’t a particularly fun chore, and with two cats and hardwood flooring everywhere, this is a task we have to repeat fairly often. The Samsung Navibot SR8855 comes with an on-board scheduling feature which means you can program it to wake up daily and go to work. Potentially, this could save us 20 minutes per day and over a full week, that’s over two hours - a full five days a year!

So, does it work?

Having just spent the morning assembling IKEA flat-pack furniture, the floors were covered with sawdust and other general packaging mess. Plus, a few days’ worth of cat fluff. It was time to put the Navibot to work.

After charging for 90 minutes (the unit is supplied at an almost empty charge), you simply press the “auto” button on the Navibot and it undocks itself and starts mapping your room. I chose the Navibot, rather than it’s main competitor the ‘Roomba’ from iRobot, because it appears to follow a much more logical pattern when cleaning your rooms than the Roomba does, which seems to do most of its navigation by bumping into things.

The Navibot has an upward-facing cameara which continuously takes pictures of your ceiling to determine the layout of your room, in connection with some distance ranging and kinetic sensors mounted on the first 180 degrees of the unit.

In just a minute or two it appeared to have figured out exactly where it was, and started linearly moving backward and forward around the room picking up cat fluff and sawdust neatly over every section it covered.

Carpets

As I mentioned above, we don’t have carpet, and I imagine the Navibot wouldn’t perform very well at all on those. Being very quiet, it clearly doesn’t have a lot of power and relies mainly on the two counter-rotating triple-brush ‘arms’ at the front of the unit to guide surface dust and fluff into the main brushes at the rear of the unit, rather than using vast amounts of suction.

In our front room, however, there is a fairly thick rug. It seems to navigate over it just fine initially, but it is a bit too thick for the unit to comfortably turn and it makes all manner of struggling sounds as it tries to desperately back away to firmer ground.

My verdict would be to avoid this if you have a carpeted house as it’ll only really pick up loose surface fluff and small debris. If you have hard flooring though, this thing is awesome!

Results

It cleaned our entire apartment, minus bathrooms, in approximately 20 minutes. The dust container was pretty full of all the usual things, indicating that it’d done quite a good job. In ‘auto’ mode, Navibot is apparently ‘afraid’ of walls, so it leaves about a 5cm margin around each wall where it doesn’t clean very effectively, relying instead on the exterior brushes to try to reach corner dust. It does, however, have an ‘edge’ mode, which you can run a few times per week if you want.

I suspect with a few uses it will get slightly more efficient at navigation, particularly since I couldn’t help myself from tinkering with its ‘manual mode’ occasionally, which lets you take control using the remote.

Once in manual mode, however, the unit stops remembering the route back to the charging dock, so you have to manually steer it back (if you ask it to return to dock on its own, it will fail miserably). On full auto though, it navigates back just fine.

Overall, I am pleased to say that this is one household gadget I’ve purchased that is actually pretty good at its job. Plus, my better half is also happy with the purchase, too – so it’s win/win. Having been programmed to wake up every morning at 6am and go to work, by the end of the week we should still have a cat-fluff and dust free floor area throughout our apartment. And neither of us will have lifted a finger.

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No doubt I’ll be tweeting updates on the #navibot so follow me for the latest!