Robot Vacuums That Empty The Cannister

If you own a robotic vacuum cleaner, you probably know that one of the most annoying things about these devices is that when their dust bin is full, you have to clean your cleaning robot. Good news; at CES a couple of robot vacuums from Asia that come with docking stations capable of emptying the dust bins automatically.

These are not the first robot vacuums to have the self-emptying dustbin feature. We've already seen one German vacuum that costs US $1,300 that can do this, and iRobot has had a patent on the books for a few years now, though the company hasn't made any announcements. So it's nice to see this feature, which we've been looking for since, well, forever, moving closer to becoming a mainstream option for consumers.

The first one comes from a company called Ecovacs. They're based in China, and their Deebot D76 sports the following tagline: "It's a vacuum cleaner, it's a robot, and it's anything you want it to be! Use Deebot D76 as anything you like!" Wow, that's pretty awesome, but let's just stick with using it as a vacuum for now, okay?

Deebot moves around using "28 radar navigators," which we take to mean that it doesn't make active maps. It cleans, avoids obstacles, doesn't fall off of things, etc. but the interesting bit is the charging dock with an integrated vacuum system that both sucks the dirt out of the robot's vacuum bin and doubles as a portable vacuum cleaner. Here it is in operation:

The second robotic vacuum comes from Samsung. The NaviBot-S includes an "auto dust emptying system," and when the robot senses that its dust bin is full, it heads back to the dock to get its dust sucked out, and as a plus it also gets its brushes cleaned. The NaviBot makes an active map as it goes (using a camera pointed at the ceiling along with infrared sensors), so it can then head back to right where it left off to finish cleaning the room.





Self-emptying dust bins do seem like a logical (if incremental) next step in the evolution of robot vacuums, and if nothing else, it's refreshing to see innovation in the consumer space.


IEEE Spectrum