The Narwal Freo Z Ultra boasts dual RGB cameras and AI-powered object recognition, offering a glimpse into the future of robot vacuums. But despite its impressive tech, its cleaning performance falls short of expectations.
The Narwal Freo Z Ultra is the first robot vacuum and mop combo with dual RGB cameras, meaning it’s got a pair of eyes that see in color, much like we do. It also features AI chips to improve decision-making and object recognition, so it should better identify locations that need cleaning and improve object avoidance. It vacuums, mops, and lives in a dock that self-empties the robot and cleans the mops.
All of that sounds promising, and it does some things quite well… I wish it were better at the actual cleaning part.The Freo Z Ultra’s improved vision and object recognition shows a lot of promise, but the vacuum still chooses inexplicable and inefficient routes, and it just doesn’t clean as thoroughly as you’d want.Chooses weirdly inefficient routesLet’s start with the basics. At a glance, the Freo Z Ultra looks much like any other high-end robot vacuum. It’s a round bot about 14 inches in diameter and roughly 4.5 inches tall. Up top is a LIDAR turret (not unlike you’d see on a self-driving car), which helps with room scanning and object recognition. In front are the aforementioned dual RGB cameras. Underneath, toward the front, you have two spindly sweeper arms that help direct debris under the robot; in the middle is the vacuum inlet with a roller brush, and toward the back are two spinning mop pads. You can also attach an included “baseboard cleaner” to it, which is effectively a fluffy duster that you stick on the side of the robot so it can wipe low, vertical surfaces. The base station is roughly 17 inches wide, 15 inches deep, and 18 inches tall. It takes proprietary 2.5L bags that Narwal claims will last you up to 120 days before you swap it, depending on how dirty your place is. It has two large, removable water tanks (one for clean water and one for dirty water) that are easy enough to empty or refill. It also has a separate cube where you can install a detergent cartridge. On the top lid is a small touch panel with some basic commands you’ll probably never use because the app and voice commands (via Google/Siri/Alexa) are much more convenient. The robot and base look sleek and modern. The base can also clean the robot’s mops with temperatures reaching 167 degrees Fahrenheit, which should be enough to kill most bacteria, and then it air dries the mops, too. The setup is pretty easy. You pull everything out of the box, attach the mops, plug the base in, fill the fresh water tank, push the bot into its base to charge, and then pair everything with the app. After sorting through some connectivity issues and firmware updates, I hit the button to scan my apartment, accomplished quickly and efficiently, mapping my whole floor plan in about 7 minutes. The map it created, though, needed some work. It correctly identified a bed and a couch, but it split my whole (one-bedroom) apartment into two big rooms. Luckily, it was straightforward enough to edit that in the app. I created dividers for the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, and entryway. That way, if just one room needed to be cleaned, I could tell it to clean that specific room.The cleaning, however, could use some work. The default profile is to clean the whole apartment, vacuuming and mopping as it sees fit, so I thought I’d start there. I hit the button on my app, and the base station announced that it was making electrolyzed water, which… I guess cleans better than regular water? Theoretically? Maybe? It glowed and looked cool, anyway. Once the mops were all saturated, the robot left its dock and went straight to a carpeted corner of my bedroom. It then meandered for a bit without mopping or vacuuming. It just kept turning itself around in a corner by my bed. Eventually, it started vacuuming and did some weird zigzag pattern that didn’t make much sense to me. It went back and vacuumed that spot again later, seemingly without reason. It also mopped one section of the floor near my bathroom sink, then went back and vacuumed it, which is the opposite order in which it should do that. Then it moped it again. Then vacuumed it again, then mopped it again. Mind you, there was no discernable dirt or debris in this spot. It just got kinda obsessed with it, and mind you, this is still before it had gone into my kitchen or cleaned the living room or anywhere else. The pattern it chose to clean my apartment seemed almost comically inefficient. I will say that it did a fairly decent job of cleaning areas once it got to them. It picked up a lot of hair and dirt from my bare floor, and it did a pretty good job of getting sand off of my medium-pile carpet, too. It was nice and quiet, too, which I appreciated. The mops did a nice, quick job of cleaning up some spilled milk on my kitchen floor. But when I laid down my infamous Snack Gauntlet (made of Goldfish crackers, pistachio shells, some pub mix, a few Tic-Tacs, and some dry, ground oregano leaf), it did just oka
ROBOT VACUUM MOP AI OBJECT RECOGNITION CLEANING PERFORMANCE NARWAL FREO Z ULTRA
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