After a long period of relative satisfaction, we have replaced our fleet of home robotic cleaners (15 year old iRobot Roomba 580/600 vacuum cleaner and 5 year old Braava jet m6 mopper) with this one and very modern machine with AI features. Although the old, albeit several times upgraded Roomba still worked as a robot vacuum cleaner almost flawlessly, it has long since served its time, and so went into a well-deserved retirement. We have never been very impressed with the Braava as a mopper, in particular we have had constant problems with it running over various floorboards and with its orientation in space. Also, the two robots didn't work together, Roomba was too old for that.
The once-dominant manufacturer iRobot has completely fallen asleep and not innovated at all in these technologies ever since Covid, so I have, albeit reluctantly, moved our choice of a new, versatile machine elsewhere. At the time of purchase, the Dreame X50 Ultra was rated as one of the top 3 robots in its category in the world. We have been quite enthusiastic about it from the beginning, although there are a number of minor problems, which will hopefully be solved by successive updates of the FW and service application. We took the white version to match the other appliances in the kitchen where the docking station with the robot is located.
As a vacuum cleaner, it is really a very capable machine, with great suction power (20 thou. Pa), 2 different brushes, and a sophisticated cleaning algorithm. And the automatic mopping capabilities have advanced tremendously since the 5 year old iRobot Braava Jet, it really is now a full-fledged and truly hygienic replacement for manual mopping. With the supply of clean water and the "dumping" of used water using external storage tanks in the dock, thorough cleaning of the rotary mops in the dock with hot water, followed by hot air drying. And also by using UV light disinfection to remove bacteria. As such, the dock is superbly designed, and with the appropriate kit is even ready for permanent connection of the clean water supply and the dirty water drainage to the waste. Also perfect is the robot's mop lifting of up to 10mm in carpeted areas - but the robot usually puts the mops in the dock beforehand when it's scheduled to vacuum the carpets, and puts them on for mopping. Automatic refilling of the cleaning solution is a matter of course. Both types of cleaning are enhanced by extendable robotic arms for both the rotating side brush when vacuuming, or the extendable servo arm of one of the rotary mops. This allows the robot to clean even hard-to-reach areas.
In the positives I would highlight mainly very quiet operation in standard vacuum mode and completely silent operation as a mopper, very good orientation in space using LIDAR, and a nice but very useful "feature" with the possibility of online transmission of the front camera. This makes it easy to check the cleaning status remotely at any time, and sometimes even see otherwise unknown "underground" shots of our home from the robot's perspective. It's a nice gadget, which perhaps only lacks streaming e.g. somewhere in the Google ecosystem: -) The robot also has its own lighting of the cleaned area, which it automatically activates in dark areas. This was a problem for Braava, who had a lot of trouble with her camera in the dark.
The 3D orientation and space navigation technologies that the robot carries on board include. and the aforementioned precision LIDAR in the retractable turret (great for low spaces), cameras and a lot of sensors that, among other things, can be used to monitor the aircraft. prevent the robot from falling down stairs, etc. This is common with other models, but the LIDAR retractable tower is really unique. It works very well and reliably, and you can allow the robot to enter even really low spaces. Randomly, the robot can enter spaces just a few millimetres higher than the robot's clearance after pulling the LIDAR turret. The extensive AI database contains hundreds of known objects that the robot can encounter at home, which it can identify and mark on the map quite accurately. For example, he found and identified our personal scale in the bathroom or a forgotten shoe in the hallway. A pretty cool and unprecedented thing is the mechanical robotic "crutches" that the robot uses to cross those really high thresholds over 4 cm (! ). The robot usually crosses (sometimes literally jumps over) common thresholds in a conventional way, but at higher or longer thresholds, where we have a groove for sliding doors, for example, the machine slides out its auxiliary "ProLeap" legs, and over the high threshold either one at a time or one at a time.
Robot endurance - the manufacturer states up to 220 minutes of continuous cleaning (6,400 mAh battery), but this will probably only be in some ideal conditions. Practically, vacuuming set to Turbo (somewhere even Max) and subsequent mopping with the "Intensive" stage, and simultaneous video transmission of the camera will certainly not give even half of the advertised 205 m² on a single charge. Realistically, about a third. But I believe in some more economical setup it can handle it. However, she will return to the dock, recharge to the minimum necessary, and complete the rest of the deferred cleanup. Here, sometimes it really does charge the battery only partially and starts cleaning again, but sometimes it charges to full capacity. But I don't think there is any setting for that.
As a negative, I would mention the occasional confusion in the order of the cleaning rooms when manually entering it, when it does not clean in "All" mode. When you do this, you click each room in turn, in the order you want the robot to clean it. The rooms are numbered on the map according to this order. This is useful, for example, if you are at home and one of the rooms is not yet ready for cleaning and will be ready later during the cleaning process. But that often doesn't happen, and Dreame goes about the cleanup in some logic and order of his own.
When cleaning is set to "Wipe after vacuuming", i.e. gradually vacuums everywhere without mops first, and only then goes to the mop dock and starts mopping, it also often happens that the robot sometimes goes with the mops already in place to rooms with carpet where it has already vacuumed. The room is marked as "fully carpeted" (not to be mopped). The robot will still go there, safely pick up the mops and then leave the room, but it is unnecessary and slows down the robot. And it increases the risk of wet mops soaking a tall carpet somewhere. But it's possible that it's some setting I've overlooked.
Even the app (for Android, I haven't tried iOS) still shows some flaws. Specifically, I can't split one initially automatically detected room into 2 different rooms. The constant error that the room cannot be divided at the point where there is a "low clearance area". But there's no such thing. Also, the application does not have a standard function for a new search of the apartment/house, respectively. adding another room to be cleaned. This has to be done in a roundabout way via the "Zone" cleaning task, in the area of the expected new room - the robot will then find it and add it to the map. Also, the entire cleaning status of the robot is missing from the app. In addition to what it does, it lacks information about where it does it, where the robot is at the moment. This way I have to laboriously search the map to find where the robot is. But the robot knows this information, I see it e.g. in its Matter integration into Home Assistant. On the other hand, the app also supports multi-floor households with the robot being transferred to other floors of the house or apartment.
In addition to its own Android/iOS app, the robot can also be controlled by its proprietary voice control, probably only meaningful to us in English. Voice control via Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Siri is also available. And there's also direct support for Apple Watch. The robot supports the Matter protocol, through which I was able to integrate it into the Home Assistant home automation system. However, even here everything is not OK. The integration into Google Home is flawless, I haven't tried the voice control yet, but I find the information on the robot tab in the "Home" app to be completely inadequate. However, I personally don't need them here, hence I never control the robot. But that will probably change soon with the switch to the Gemini voice model.
