=sigh= Home robotics still has a ways to go, don't they?

A long while ago I bought a robot vacuum I named "Carl" after the janitor from The Breakfast Club. He was an imitation iRobot Roomba by Ecovacs, so he was cheap, but I didn't have a lot of furniture to confuse him or junk laying around my house to block him, so I was thrilled with how well it worked. Almost immediately I bought a companion mopping robot by iRobot that I named "Joy" after Joy Mangano (the lady who created the Miracle Mop (and was portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie biography Joy).

The mopping robot was just okay.

It worked better in my bathrooms which are smaller and easier to clean because they are tile. It worked less better in the kitchen, because it was bigger and the pad got dirty before it could finish. It didn't work AT ALL in any other spaces. Partly because they were too big... but mostly because the little vibrating pad ripped up my hideously expensive (but shoddily-made) hardwood floors. I used it for a half-year in the bathrooms, but eventually trashed it.

Fast-forward to last week after I was washing my floor on my hands and knees and thought to look at mopping robots again. The one that caught my eye was the Bissell Spinwave. The pads aren't a vibrating pad, so I had high hopes that it wouldn't tear up my shitty floors...

So I went to buy one and... FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS?!? Does it blow me after it finishes mopping? Because that's the only way I'd spend that kind of money.

But then I Googled to see if there was an alternative that might work for less money... only to find that Best Buy was advertising the R5 model I wanted (it has mapping on the app) for $220 (which is less than the cheaper non-R5 model!). Still more money than the $150 that I was wanting to spend, but if it works...

When I got New Joy, I set her up next to New Carl so I could charge it. Once Jake came downstairs from his nap, it took him all of seconds to see (smell?) something new...

My hopes for New Joy were dashed when it left its charging station, turned a corner around the legs of my hutch, and got stuck...

Jake found this to be hilarious...

But, seconds after I took the above photo (and before I could pull New Joy out from under the hutch), she freed herself. Nice!

Which brings us to the R5 model's mapping. The reason it's supposed to be worth the $550 price tag. It's actually very cool. The unit has a LIDAR camera spinning on top which is constantly updating it as it moves around the space. For example... this is what Joy thought my living room looked like...

But once it sees that it can go behind my couch, the map is updated to reflect that...

The mapping even noticed where "rooms" are located and decided to mop the entirety of my "great room" (living room to dining room) before moving on to the kitchen/entry hall, downstairs bathroom, and guest bedroom...

But then... uh oh. The map cleared itself shortly after entering my kitchen. Even worse, Joy stopped reporting her location accurately. She would randomly appear all over my house, but then always snap back to her actual location...

Jesus. THIS is what Bissell charges FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS?!?

You can define Go/No-Go areas easy enough, and your robot will remember it for any future moppings...

Unfortunately, there is a minimum size area you can define... and it's fucking HUGE. If you need tiny areas defined... like my cat feeding station and second cat water fountain... you'd better fucking hope that they are against a wall so you can have it bleed off the edge. As you can see, I got lucky.

And then we get to one of the most idiotic, head-scratching failures of this FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLAR robot... you can't define rooms/areas and save them for future use. Sure you can draw an area you want cleaned and send the robot to do that, but you can't save them for next time. They disappear after the cleaning happens...

What the fuck? It would seem that Bissell expects you to clean your entire fucking house in one go. But come on, that's not even remotely feasible. Because your little mopping pads will get dirty fairly quickly, which means it will be washing your floors with dirt. Blergh. This should be a priority for Bissell, because yikes.

When it comes to my home, I don't have tons of furniture and practically no clutter. Which makes it an excellent candidate for robots. There's hardly any obstacles for it to get caught up on. And yet... this happened...

This seemed weird. First of all because Joy was, as usual, randomly reporting herself where she wasn't located. The map was showing that she was at her docking station. But she wasn't. So I had to go looking for her. Turns out she wedged herself between the toilet and the wall...

I don't even know how to respond to this. It's not smart enough to throw itself into reverse and back out of there?

Later on I stopped hearing Joy run. At first I thought she was out of battery and couldn't return to her docking station. The map wasn't reporting her location, so off I went again to try and find her. Oh. Despite her having a FUCKING "SOFT-EDGE SENSOR" LIKE BISSELL ADVERTISES, she was choking on a rug...

Jesus. But that's not the worst of it. Do you see hoe the bed in my guest bedroom has a dust ruffle around the bottom? Joy thought it was a solid wall and didn't mop under the bed! I added a "GO" area and sent her back in the room... but she returned without mopping under the bed! So the only way to mop my guest bedroom is to remove the rugs and the dust ruffle...

So what have we got here...

• PRO: It does a good job mopping, even though you'll want to limit how much it mops to smaller areas so you can throw the mopping pads in with the wash so that you're not pushing dirt around.
• CON: Except you can't save the smaller areas you create because the app is fucking brain dead.
• PRO: The mopping pads don't rip up my expensive, shitty hardwood floors. I haven't tried the "dusting pads" but I have zero intent of ever using them, so whatever.
• CON: While the mopping is good, the vacuuming is bad. Fortunately I have a separate vacuum which does a good job, so I just run it first, but why bother with a vacuum attachment if you're not going to put a powerful enough vacuum in it to make it worth doing?
• CON: To get the LIDAR mapping capability, you have to pay FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS for the R5 model (or $220 if you get it on sale like I did)... and then it doesn't even report to the app reliably? It erases and can't even report the robot's location!
• CON: Apparently the robot has "soft edge" detection so it doesn't get stuck on carpets and knows when to raise the mopping pads... or whatever. But the feature is useless because the robot will choke on any carpets!
• CON: Can get stuck easily if the space is just tight enough to enter, but (apparently) not loose enough to back out of?
• PRO: The liquid cleaner reservoir is pretty big. I was able to clean my entire downstairs and never had to refill it.
• CON: The liquid cleaner reservoir is a bitch to fill. You're supposed to fill it with water to a certain level... then fill the remainder with the concentrated cleaning liquid. Except thanks to poor design, the reservoir is overflowing before you can even add the cleaner! Tragic.
• CON: The robot doesn't just "mop" in wet mode... it mops while it vacuums. But the vacuum dirt chamber is so tiny that you are pretty much forced to vacuum before you mop.
• CON: The app is awful. Fails mapping after a time, doesn't report the location of the robot accurately, doesn't save defined areas, and won't even always report when there's a problem. If Bissell is serious about staying in the robot cleaning space, they need to do a lot better than this.

Ultimately I'm going to keep New Joy because she mops just well enough that the $220 price is worth it. Had I been able to afford the original $550 price tag, she would have been boxed up and returned within one hour of opening the box.

Maybe I'm just happy that I have a solution for mopping my floors that doesn't involve me doing so on my hands and knees with a wet rag?

I dunno.

But welcome to the family, New Joy.