Ok, “remarkable” may or may not be premature – I’m still at the “stunned with my new gadget” stage.This new Switchbot vacuum has auto water refill, waste emptying and 90 day trash disposal intervals (OK, enough of the sales blurb).I just received mine and it is planned to be on sale mid-September 2025 – that would be… about now! So what are my qualifications and what do I know so far? Firstly – check out my first robot vacuum review here.
I learned a LOT from Xiaomi unit and since June 2021 I’ve updated the above review several times as I’ve learned more about that (for the time) remarkable device… but it’s time to move on.If robot vacuums are not your field – we’re talking about a Lidar-AI-camera-guided domestic vacuum which has a charging station (to which the S20 returns automatically for emptying, refilling, charging etc) complete with 2 water tanks.See the image below left – the camera is where? On the front side of course – the Lidar is that section on the top.
It is fixed, no maintenance.The S20 vacuum works with the Switchbot APP and is (apparently) compatible with Apple watch, Alexa, Google Assistant and more.The device will sit at it’s base station all day awaiting your command or run on automatic schedule for cleaning and (if you like) wet-washing your floor.
Comparing this visually with my earlier Xiaomi unit, clearly most Lidar-driven vacuums have a similar look and feel so I felt right at home with the S20, just a few things were not immediately obvious to me – in particular the water cleaning and storage setup and the improved verbal responses are very welcome.Still – I had to work my way up to making good use of the device, thankfully the manual (the S20 comes packed with manuals in different languages) is very good and the vacuum itself is very chatty – gone are the days when they had to keep speech to a minimum.I took a water container out of the charger base and immediately was greeted with clear and re-assuring audio feedback.
So what do you get? Where do I start? The vacuum came in a huge far from flimsy shipping box and the vacuum and peripherals were well packed to avoid any issues when transporting.Sadly we’re moving home soon and my wife has already commandeered the packing box Headlines include deep cleaning, anti-tangle, multi-clean, Lidar, whole-home cleaning and far more than I care to go into here.But these are just words.
No, it won’t climb stairs But as we’re (hopefully) about to move to a home with a single floor – do I care? There are a couple of steps to one bedroom in the new home – but I’m so excited about this – I see ramps in my future so it can do the whole house (cave-home in fact – tiled floors with thick carpet in the livingroom and likely the bedrooms) So – we have a vacuum that cleans and also mops floors – what else? I asked my wife to hold up the two water containers for this photo – the containers are mounted in the charging unit and simply lift out.One is for waste water, the other fresh water with Switchbot cleaning fluid).As she did that, a voice clearly piped up to say that water containers had been removed.
This all looks just SO convenient.See above the base unit and the seals that allow the vacuum to fill up with water and evacuate waste without any manual intervention over a period of weeks – depending on useage.Time will tell but it is clearly going to be important to keep these seals clean.
Why the colours on the left? The base charging unit I’ve positioned next to our living room cabinet and there’s a blue backlight behind the latter – I wanted to show this thing in it’s actual, real resting place.Day 1: Onto using the vacuum: From now on I’ll refer to the vacuum unit as Robbie for simplicity.Having placed the charging unit in that convenient spot in the living room and having given Robbie a short while at the dock to make sure it had some charge, I then hit the power button on Robbie which then went off all by itself to fathom out the room layout – using Vision SLAM, a technology that allows Robbie to create a map of its (initially) unknown environment and simultaneously track its own position and orientation within that map, using only visual data from the front camera which has 2 bright lights which only come on when needed.
Here is Robbie on it’s first exploratory, unguided outing..Vision SLAM (apparently) uses feature extraction, tracking, and geometric algorithms to build 3D maps from a sequence of images, enabling high-precision navigation and robust localization.I say that as if I fully understand how it works – I don’t – but it does work… shortly thereafter, the S20 started to go through the living room..
See the image right – it took no time at all for Robbie to make a rough outline of our living room – then start to go around it cleaning up – I honestly have no idea how it managed a semi-accurate, recognisable room outline BEFORE travelling around it completely.My last Robbie knew only about the area it had actually cleaned… but that’s progress.The central (black) depiction of the couch and the table in front of it (below the couch in the image – right) is not yet quite right but what a start… Meanwhile the two of us sat for ages simply watching Robbie going about it’s duty, cleaning the floor while refining it’s room model – all without bashing into furniture.
Day 2: Realising I don’t know that much This morning (Sunday) we got out of bed and sat down in the living room determined to get a better grasp of what this system is doing..In the coming photos you’ll see the area has been split up into “rooms” by Robbie, marked as A to D.I didn’t do any of this – the vacuum did – when “mapping”.
In reality the area is mainly one open area comprising our living room and kitchen… leading to the hallway on the lower left and on the lower right, stairs down to a bedroom (Robbie as yet knows nothing of the actual bedroom) – in the image above right, Robbie had not yet spotted the latter.It HAD however spotted one small circle (orange – left) and in the APP, on clicking that circle, I was asked to clarify if that was fabric or something else (I was shown a photo of the area).In reality it was just a carpet pattern – I told robbie to ignore it in future.
Another piece of fabric later on was indeed spotted correctly.Above you see the map created by the vacuum comprises the kitchen area and part of the living room area at the top, B (the rest of the living room) and the part of C that the vacuum has cleaned also being living room area – stopping near the bottom right because that’s where the stairs down begin.Over on the lower left you see area D – that’s the hallway.
Again I didn’t decide these borders – the vacuum did.See image above – my yellow shape shows you the stairs down -which Robbie correctly avoided.The red area is all fireplace.
The green area a narrow gap behind a car scratching post… Robbie has more work to do to do on that.My next job will be to manually adjust these areas, joining A, B and C into one area.So, starting to understand some of the machine logic and wondering about other bits of it.
Why no mention yet of the wet cleaning/scrubbing? I want to be sure this machine has a clear understanding of the house before I go getting anything wet – my credibility and that of Robbie depends on it – right now its “This is wonderful” which could quickly turn to “That thing ruined my carpet”.Better safe than sorry Meanwhile our first surprise: Our old Xiaomi vacuum, once it had cleaned the room (no partitioning – just anywhere that wasn’t an obstacle or stairs) then returned to the dock and it was up to me after each cleaning to open up the vacuum and empty the cat-hair-infested filter box – pertty much every time.When Robbie returned to the charger today, we realised what “quiet mode” is for as a very loud sucking, cleaning noise emerged from the charging dock which decided to clean out the vacuum.
That lasted all of a couple of minutes.This will be ongoing – still impressed….
