A harsh robot knows no mercy: a review of the LG Hombot VRD710RRC vacuum cleaner

The robot vac­u­um clean­er from LG blew up the CHIP test lab, but we man­aged to quell the upris­ing of the machines. What else is this incred­i­bly inde­pen­dent device capa­ble of?

Test results

The LG Hom­bot VRD710RRC is a robot vac­u­um that goes from one extreme to anoth­er. It is very qui­et — but its motor is weak. Nav­i­ga­tion is excel­lent — but it lit­er­al­ly pounces on pieces of fur­ni­ture. The robot has many smart clean­ing modes — but no app. It is inex­pen­sive — but sucks up dust worse than even cheap­er mod­els. Yes, and LG Hom­bot does its job so rude­ly that after the tests we had to restore the test lab. In the end, we gave this par­tic­u­lar home assis­tant only a “sat­is­fac­to­ry” rat­ing.

Test results LG Hombot VRD710RRC

Lots of bells and whistles and low price

Despite the fact that the LG VRD710RRC robot vac­u­um clean­er costs about 28,000 rubles, you get excel­lent video cam­era nav­i­ga­tion, time pro­gram­ming, remote con­trol, dis­play, firmware upgrade­abil­i­ty and a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing modes.

The robot from LG remem­bers the room and builds more effi­cient routes. It is also able to re-pass sec­tions and inde­pen­dent­ly switch between dif­fer­ent suc­tion pow­er modes. In addi­tion, it is quite small (the height of the robot is 8.9 cm), but equipped with a fair­ly large 600 ml dust con­tain­er.

With all these pos­si­bil­i­ties and such a won­der­ful cost, there must be a catch some­where. And he is here — and not alone.

Brutal robot does not respect furniture

Some robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers are a bit rough with fur­ni­ture. For exam­ple, if the device does not have ultra­son­ic sen­sors, it may bang loud­ly against a chair leg. Hav­ing hit the bumper, the robot under­stands: “Oh, there is some­thing there.” After that, he calm­ly turns around and removes a more free area. Of course, some­times such maneu­vers leave scratch­es on the fur­ni­ture, but in most cas­es these inci­dents are harm­less.

But LG Hom­bot VRD710RRC knows no mer­cy. Dur­ing the test, he moved chairs, pulled out cables and pushed the walls of our test obsta­cles a good half a meter before notic­ing that some­thing was wrong. His climb­ing skills are also sur­pris­ing: for exam­ple, a surge pro­tec­tor with sev­er­al out­lets was rec­og­nized by Hom­bot as an obsta­cle, and climb­ing over it, the robot turned off a run­ning com­put­er. But the vac­u­um clean­er refused to climb to a small height and could not climb small 2‑centimeter boards.

After such cleaning, it is necessary to make repairs

Hom­bot is the first robot vac­u­um that caused us to redo the test room. In our test cham­ber, the walls are lined with sound-absorb­ing mate­r­i­al from floor to ceil­ing. This seemed to inter­fere with the robot very much, as its side brush­es dug into the mate­r­i­al again and again. But in such a sit­u­a­tion, the motor did not turn off and did not start to rotate in the oppo­site direc­tion, but con­tin­ued to wind up the “caught” mate­r­i­al until it tore off a piece or dis­charged the bat­tery.

We made three launch attempts and after that col­lect­ed sev­er­al pieces of torn sound­proof­ing, after which we decid­ed to remove the low­er part of the cladding through­out the room. But this was only a tem­po­rary solu­tion to the prob­lem. On the exam­ple of socks and Lego blocks, the robot from LG proved that it does not respect oth­er peo­ple’s prop­er­ty at all. In some sit­u­a­tions, it can do more dam­age than any of the robot vac­u­ums we’ve ever test­ed.

Rough but weak

How does Hom­bot real­ly behave, if you do not pay atten­tion to his rude man­ners? It was only able to pick up about 17 per­cent of the quartz sand we scat­tered — not a bad result, but some cheap­er mod­els do a much bet­ter job of this. In addi­tion, nei­ther the motor nor the brush of the vac­u­um clean­er could col­lect an accept­able amount of woolen threads from the car­pet. But the LG VRD710RRC is very qui­et, and you can run it even when you are in the same room with the device.

You will find all robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers in our big rat­ing. Below we have select­ed two alter­na­tives to the test­ed mod­el.

Alternative: Neato Robotics Botvac D3 Connected

Neato Robot­ics Bot­vac D3 Con­nect­ed is our price-per­for­mance leader. This robot has almost no draw­backs, and among the advan­tages is high suc­tion pow­er and its own appli­ca­tion. Top device for the mid­dle price cat­e­go­ry.

Alternative: Samsung Powerbot VR7000

Sam­sung Power­bot VR7000 is a robot with excel­lent nav­i­ga­tion and a calm dis­po­si­tion. It costs a lit­tle more, works slow­er, but does not leave behind chaos and destruc­tion.

Characteristics and test results of LG Hombot VRD710RRC

Pho­to: chip.de, man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies