Do you remember the first time you used a robot vacuum? I remember mine. It was one of iRobot’s early Roombas. I was transfixed, watching this chunky black disc whiz noisily around, bashing into walls and furniture before zipping off in seemingly random directions like a hockey puck slapped haphazardly across the ice. It wasn’t good at its job, but in a way, its clumsy sort of chaos made it charming.
Nothing is charming about most robot vacuums, now. In fact, most of them are boring as hell. Don’t get me wrong, they can be nice to have. But it feels like manufacturers have made a collective decision to ignore the R2-D2 of it all in their quest to turn their products into Very Serious Appliances. Why that might be is anyone’s guess, but I suspect either it hasn’t occurred to them to make a robot vacuum fun or they want people to see their products as sophisticated, advanced technology. Or maybe it’s just very hard to nail fun.
Whatever the reason, it has led us to this place where robot vacuums all look about the same: the friendly, rounded curves of the early models have been replaced with harder edges and sheer, flat design. Many have sensor clusters jutting out of the top so they actually know where they’re going, unlike my freewheeling Roomba of old. They’re also smarter and less likely to get trapped under your couch, and they’ve got robotic parts that let them get to more places. (See the independently lifting wheels from the Roborock Saros 10R or the periscope-like sensor cluster of the new Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller.) And in recent years, their docks have become much more than a place to recharge and maybe empty dustbins—now, they can swap out mopping solutions and even cleaning parts of the robots themselves.
The problem is: Too many of them still suck (pun intended) at basic cleaning tasks. Some are better than others, but generally speaking, they’re still prone to being disabled by misplaced trinkets, leaving obvious trash behind on carpets, or creating a moat of dirt around the edge of a rug. Their automated docks are impressive, but they’re also a constant source of noise. To many of these companies, “better” seems to be synonymous with “busier and more complicated.”
Enter Matic, founded by former Nest engineers who set out to create a robot vacuum, also called the Matic, that can “mimic human perception and self-learning through cameras and Neural Networks” to clean more like a human being—and that does its job locally, no cloud connection needed. The home robotics company has since put out a device that both looks and works better than the vast majority of its competition, albeit for a high price. But it does so with an irresistible charm that I haven’t seen in a gadget in years.
Matic Robot Vacuum It's disarmingly charming robot vacuum with great performance and very few minor quibbles. 4 Pros Stellar vacuum performance
Solid mopping
Immensely charming
Quiet operation
Detailed map
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