Yujin Robot has created a smarter robot that thoroughly cleans your home without you needing to be present, ¡°iclebo Smart.
YujinRobot's Cleaning Robot, iclebo Smart(self-mapping navigation version), automatically generates a map for your home by continuously taking photos of the ceiling and the walls while it cleans. With this map, it can decide for itself what parts of your home have not yet been cleaned and will know when it has done the job.
Armed with more than twenty detection sensors, iclebo Smart can avoid collisions with the wall or the furniture and abort from dangerous situations such as falling down stairs. With these, it can also switch between modes that allow it to avoid (mopping mode) or climb (climbing mode) carpets/rugs up to 13mm in height.
It will also look after itself. Using its map of your home, it will always return to its starting location for recharging once its finished the job. Even better, if it has run out of batteries before it has finished the job, it will return to home base, recharge, and then continue from where it left off as if there was no interruption in service.
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I clearly remember reading on the Internet about a book published many decades ago regarding what life would be like in the 21st century. It had the usual futuristic predictions such as flying cars and Martian colonies. Most of those predictions are yet to become real, but one thing that has come true is robots for the home. Of course they aren't as fantastic as some of the ones depicted in movies, comic books and so on, but home robots, and specifically robotic vacuum cleaners, have become widely available since the beginning of the first decade of the new century.
Since then I've used several of these little robotic disks, but today I'm going to discuss what I think is a robot vacuum that takes existing technology to a new level. I think most of us have either seen or used a robot vacuum, and are familiar with the technology as well as the limitations. So let's take a look at what makes this one different.
The iClebo comes with a dock like most robot vacuums. I installed the charging dock in one of our dressing rooms, which is always dusty because of the clothes and fabric as well as the dust carried in from outside by our customers. The charging station took about two hours to charge the iClebo, and the cord can be stored inside the dock after charging to stay out of the way once the robot starts cleaning.
Every function on the iClebo can be controlled by a remote, including power, run and stop, turbo, docking, timer functions, and cleaning duration. The turbo is sort of a boost function that increases the strength of the vacuum, and the timer can be used to program the robot to clean automatically at a certain time of day. There is even a set of directional keys that can be used to manually steer the robot if you need to, a feature that I had never seen before. All of these functions can be input directly on the robot, of course.
When the robot was fully charged, I installed the side brushes and got ready to take it for a test drive. The iClebo has four different operational modes: auto, carpet, mopping and climbing. The auto function uses the robot's sensors to move around the room and run its brushes and vacuum. The carpet and climbing modes can be used to clean an area with carpeting or doorways, respectively. The mopping mode can be used with the optional wet mop attachment. I set the robot on auto made and it began to navigate around the room with the familiar zigzag pattern of robot vacuums.
What makes the iClebo so unique is that while most robot vacuums use infrared sensors built into the robot vacuum itself or a separate set of navigation "towers" that you are instructed to place on your TV or on a high shelf that can look down and feed information to the robot, the iClebo has built in optical sensors--in short, eyes. The optical sensors basically take pictures of the room, and the robot decides where to go based on this optical input. The robot takes continuous pictures of the ceiling and walls while it moves to figure out what part of the room needs to be cleaned and what part has already been dealt with. In addition to the optical sensors, over 20 detection sensors keep the iClebo from colliding with the walls or furnitures or falling down the stairs. If it runs out of battery power in the middle of a cleaning cycle, it will return automatically to the dock, recharge, and set off again, all on its own.
There are a lot of robot vacuums on the market but I think the iClebo has features that makes it stand out among the competition. What won me over was the different modes for different cleaning situations. And while I couldn't personally see the optical sensor do its work, I could tell that the robot "saw" the room much better than my previous robot vacuums that only relied on infrared sensors and collision detectors. This is a truly smart robot that I think represents the future global standard for these devices.
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