Hoover RoboCom 3 robot vacuum test and review: intelligent cleaning

Mod­ern house­hold devices are becom­ing more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced, and the list of their capa­bil­i­ties is grow­ing expo­nen­tial­ly. For exam­ple, many house­wives are hap­py to use mul­ti­cook­ers with the func­tion of con­trol and pro­gram­ming via a smart­phone. It is much more con­ve­nient, and you can do much more cook­ing pro­grams.

Now you can already find cli­mate con­trol sys­tems in the house, a wash­ing machine con­fig­ured via Wi-Fi, a kitchen hood and a cof­fee mak­er. More­over, all these devices are eas­i­ly com­bined into a sin­gle sys­tem called “Smart Home”, which makes their man­age­ment con­ve­nient and sim­ple. The cost of such a sys­tem, accord­ing to man­u­fac­tur­ers, is not much high­er than that of con­ven­tion­al devices.

At the same time, the help of robot­ic sys­tems in home life does not come as quick­ly as we would like. If the first auto­mat­ic wash­ing machine appeared in 1947, then automa­tion in the clean­ing sys­tem came only in 2002, when the first robot vac­u­um clean­er was intro­duced. Even then, he received a stan­dard set of func­tions that are still present in almost all mod­els from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. At the same time, the first vac­u­um clean­er in its clas­sic form was intro­duced by Hoover in 1908. Now this man­u­fac­tur­er has in its assort­ment sev­er­al mod­els of robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers.

Hoover RoboCom 3: basic feature set

We test­ed the base mod­el Hoover Robo­Com 3 (RBC 040 019), which has one side brush and is equipped with a medi­um-capac­i­ty bat­tery. You can con­trol the robot using the touch pan­el on the body or via the remote con­trol.

On the Russ­ian mar­ket, you can also find a mod­el equipped with a Wi-Fi mod­ule, which makes it pos­si­ble to con­trol the device through a mobile appli­ca­tion on a smart­phone, and a more capa­cious bat­tery (RBC090/1, a more expen­sive mod­el of 2016).

Among the declared func­tions of our test copy are auto­mat­ic clean­ing of the room, clean­ing of a giv­en area by spec­i­fy­ing the desired point, man­u­al con­trol of the move­ment of the vac­u­um clean­er using the remote con­trol, and pro­gram­ming of clean­ing for a week.

Modern equipment

Most robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers on the mar­ket are lim­it­ed to a stan­dard set of but­tons for set­ting up and con­trol­ling the device. Our test sub­ject in this sense well out­per­formed the com­peti­tors: on the upper side of the vac­u­um clean­er there is an infor­ma­tion LCD screen with lumi­nous sym­bols and a touch con­trol pan­el. On the screen, the user can see the sta­tus of the bat­tery and its charg­ing, the dis­play of the “Tur­bo” mode, the cur­rent clean­ing sched­ul­ing set­tings and the indi­ca­tor of the con­nect­ed remote con­trol.

The robot vac­u­um clean­er is equipped with one side 3‑blade brush to col­lect dust from the right side for clean­ing around fur­ni­ture and base­boards. In the cen­ter under the hous­ing, dust is col­lect­ed by a tan­dem of a 4‑lamellar sil­i­cone shaft and a cylin­dri­cal spi­ral brush.

As the robot moves, the dust is gen­tly swept away and sucked into a small quick-release dust con­tain­er equipped with a HEPA fil­ter to pro­tect the motor and clean the exhaust air.

On the bot­tom of the case there is access to the bat­tery — to remove it, just unscrew a cou­ple of screws. This oper­a­tion may be required if you do not plan to use the device for a long time, for exam­ple, if you leave your apart­ment for more than 3 months. Remov­ing the bat­tery will pre­vent it from being com­plete­ly dis­charged.

Along the perime­ter of the low­er sur­face and on the side faces, there are sen­sors for assess­ing the sur­face and move­ment. On the top of the case there are IR sen­sors for obsta­cles and search­ing for a base sta­tion.

The vac­u­um clean­er is equipped with a remote con­trol with which you can quick­ly set the cur­rent time on the device, pro­gram the start of the clean­ing process dur­ing the week, and also direct­ly con­trol the vac­u­um clean­er, as if you were doing it with a radio-con­trolled machine.

Setup, control and programming

Before start­ing the robot for clean­ing, the man­u­fac­tur­er rec­om­mends ful­ly charg­ing its bat­tery, which lasts about 3 hours. It is not very con­ve­nient that even with a ful­ly charged bat­tery, the charg­ing process light on the base sta­tion con­tin­ues to flash.

To con­nect the remote con­trol to the robot vac­u­um clean­er, you need to enable syn­chro­niza­tion on the device itself by hold­ing the but­ton with the image of the remote con­trol on the touch pan­el for a long time (about 4 s). If you press it briefly, the Tur­bo mode will turn on, in which the vac­u­um clean­er moves about twice as fast. We liked this mode the most, because. allows you to achieve clean­li­ness in the room in just 15–20 min­utes. How­ev­er, when pro­gram­ming for a week, only the stan­dard dri­ving mode is avail­able.

The device has the abil­i­ty to set the clean­ing of a spe­cif­ic place in the room — spot clean­ing mode. This mode is used for inten­sive clean­ing of a lim­it­ed area. At the same time, the robot moves along an ellipse with a con­stant increase in the radius of move­ment.

The man­u­fac­tur­er claims four types of move­ment: zigzag, edge, ellip­ti­cal and square. They are applied auto­mat­i­cal­ly by the machine and there is no way for the user to select them man­u­al­ly. In our opin­ion, it would be nice to add such an oppor­tu­ni­ty, because. the chaot­ic move­ment of the vac­u­um clean­er still does not guar­an­tee clean­ing of the entire floor sur­face.

Per­haps the most inter­est­ing fea­ture in Hoover Robo­Com 3 is its pro­gram­ming for clean­ing dur­ing the week. But first you need to set the cur­rent date on it. You can do both with the remote con­trol only. For set­tings, the up and down arrows are main­ly used, for con­fir­ma­tion — the OK but­ton. To select the day of the clean­ing week, use the “right” arrow; to can­cel the day, use the “left” arrow.

Artificial intelligence and movement algorithm

The man­u­fac­tur­er has incor­po­rat­ed an AAI infrared nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem (“Advanced Algo­rith­mic Intel­li­gence”) into the device, which allows you to com­bine the move­ment scheme, depend­ing on the data received from the sen­sors.

To start clean­ing imme­di­ate­ly, just press the Auto but­ton either on the remote con­trol or on the device pan­el. After that, the robot will leave the charg­ing sta­tion (if it was on it), pro­ceed approx­i­mate­ly to the mid­dle of the room, inspect it, turn­ing 360 degrees in place, and turn on the stan­dard pro­gram for clean­ing the floor from dust in an unwind­ing spi­ral.

As soon as the robot touch­es some obsta­cle on its way, accord­ing to our assump­tions, the pro­gram that sim­u­lates the rebound of the ball turns on, the vac­u­um clean­er turns to the left at 45 degrees and moves to the next obsta­cle. Turn­ing is car­ried out both to the left and to the right. For exam­ple, the device will only turn left for the entire clean­ing, but if you raise it (at the same time, the robot will squeak and report an error on the dis­play) and low­er it, the robot will turn on the algo­rithm with a right turn. After sev­er­al straight trips, the device will crawl out again, start a cir­cu­lar inspec­tion and begin to move in a spi­ral.

If you want to urgent­ly fin­ish clean­ing, you just need to press the but­ton with the image of the house (Home) on the remote con­trol or on the device pan­el. The robot will turn off the rota­tion of the low­er brush and start search­ing for a charg­ing sta­tion, and then pro­ceed to it.

Annoying Navigation Bugs

Dur­ing the tests, the robot for the most part react­ed in advance to obsta­cles and bypassed them using space sen­sors. At the same time, the device some­times rest­ed against the fur­ni­ture and skid­ded for sev­er­al sec­onds, appar­ent­ly not receiv­ing a sig­nal from the sen­sors of the springy bumper. A slight pres­sure on its front rub­ber­ized edge — and the robot itself goes around the obsta­cle.

The man­u­fac­tur­er rec­om­mends free­ing the room from chairs and wires before clean­ing. In our case, only a mas­sive com­put­er chair was not removed. It was its sup­ports that turned out to be raised high enough above the floor so that our very thin (thick­ness is the height, less than 70 mm) robot could dri­ve under them. In doing so, he man­aged to get his first scratch­es on his beau­ti­ful sil­ver back.

If the man­u­fac­tur­er had pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tive pads not only on the side faces (they are on the bumper), but also on the front sur­face, such dam­age could have been avoid­ed.

Battery Life and Prevention

Although the man­u­fac­tur­er claims 90 min­utes of bat­tery life for the robot clean­er, our test­ing showed that the device is capa­ble of clean­ing for 130 min­utes. After that, the robot demon­strates its ener­gy deple­tion and, with the last of its strength, begins to search for and move the charg­ing sta­tion. The man­u­fac­tur­er claims that it starts charg­ing when the bat­tery is dis­charged by 85%. The device can restore the ener­gy reserve both on the base and when the pow­er sup­ply plug is direct­ly con­nect­ed to the sock­et on the case. The test charg­ing of the “exhaust­ed” clean­ing robot last­ed 3 hours, which can be con­sid­ered the norm for a 1500 mAh bat­tery.

While the device is charg­ing, you can emp­ty the dust con­tain­er and clean the HEPA fil­ter draw­er. The pack­age includes a spe­cial brush and 2 spare car­tridges.

As expe­ri­ence has shown, the vac­u­um clean­er col­lects well not only dust from linen, but also sand. After vac­u­um­ing, we ran a PVA sponge over the sur­face of the floor and did not find a sin­gle speck of dust on it, which indi­cates a very high-qual­i­ty work of the device.

How­ev­er, larg­er sol­id objects are best picked up with a more pow­er­ful vac­u­um clean­er. The robot will also allow you to keep the floor clean from every­day dust dur­ing the week; it is easy to pro­gram it to auto­mat­i­cal­ly clean 3 days a week (although you can clean it every day).

Before or after charg­ing, it is rec­om­mend­ed to clean the bot­tom of the device after each clean­ing, espe­cial­ly the wheels, brush­es and sen­sors from the dust col­lect­ed dur­ing the move­ment. This takes about five min­utes, how­ev­er, if you have pro­grammed dai­ly clean­ing, this process can be some­what annoy­ing.

Test results:

The Hoover Robo­Com 3 robot vac­u­um clean­er made a good impres­sion both in terms of design and build qual­i­ty, and in terms of every­day use. Giv­en the low cost of the device — about 13,000 rubles, this mod­el can be rec­om­mend­ed for the widest audi­ence, because. it is easy to main­tain and does not require spe­cial skills in man­age­ment and pro­gram­ming. The robot will allow you to keep the room clean through­out the week, how­ev­er, you must not for­get to clean the vac­u­um clean­er itself. Some ques­tions are raised by the algo­rithm of move­ment dur­ing clean­ing and the oper­a­tion of the device’s obsta­cle sen­sors. Also, the oper­a­tion of the vac­u­um clean­er dur­ing the clean­ing process can­not be called very qui­et.

Pros:

• Attrac­tive appear­ance
• Con­ve­nient and easy oper­a­tion and pro­gram­ming
• Easy to main­tain
• Long bat­tery life on a sin­gle charge
• light weight

Minuses:

• One edge brush
• No choice of move­ment algo­rithm
• Insuf­fi­cient­ly accu­rate oper­a­tion of obsta­cle sen­sors
• Rel­a­tive­ly noisy in clean­ing mode

Specifications:

You can also choose a suit­able mod­el accord­ing to oth­er para­me­ters in our sum­ma­ry rat­ing of robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers.

A pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, Andrey Kireev

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