Robot vacuum cleaners are amazing. They can keep pet hair at bay, wipe up small spills, and otherwise keep your home tidy and dust-free between regular deep cleanings. In most cases, a robotic vacuum cleaner or robotic mop can be set and forgotten: you can schedule automatic cleaning and even cleaning specific rooms on specific days.
But what if you have an uncomfortable carpet, pet feeding area, or oddly shaped piece of furniture that keeps bugging your bot until it runs out of battery and dies without completing its mission? Or if you want to keep the machine out of certain rooms or areas? Today’s robot vacuums are super smart and it’s easy to control where they can and shouldn’t go in your home. Here’s what you need to know.
How to set boundaries and virtual barriers for robot vacuum cleaners and mops
There are several different ways you can prevent a robot vacuum from entering certain areas of your home. Depending on the age of the robot and the technology it came with, you have a few different options.
Use the app to set up virtual walls or boundaries
The latest robotic vacuum cleaners and mops are smart. Equipped with cameras or lasers, they can “see” their way around your house, and on their first runs they’ll create a fairly detailed map of your space. (When shopping for a robot vacuum, look for robots that advertise LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, or VSLAM, which stands for Visual Simultaneous Locating and Mapping.) Once the mapping is complete, you can view it within the robot vacuum’s apps. Here you can mark rooms, customize areas, and create virtual walls, no-go zones, and out-of-bounds areas.
Setting up restricted zones in the robot vacuum cleaner application
Most robotic vacuum cleaner manufacturers make it easy to manage your space and the way it is cleaned. Some apps let you draw simple lines, while others use digital frames that can be adjusted with the snap of your fingers to let you plot areas on a map of your virtual home where you’d rather your robot vacuum not go. Each manufacturer’s app is different, but usually you’ll just need to enter a map of your home and then search for terms like Virtual Wall, Virtual Border, No Zone, or No Zone to enable and customize these options.
Advantages of setting up virtual barriers and restricted zones for robotic vacuum cleaners
Whether you’re trying to keep your robot vacuum from spilling the dog’s water bowl or you have an annoying couch that your robot keeps getting stuck under, you can ban your device from entering. Other common reasons for setting up virtual barriers and restricted zones include the need to prevent a bot from getting stuck on low-hanging curtains or to prevent it from getting stuck in a pile of clothes that is usually on the laundry room floor. , for example.
For the most part, manufacturers of robotic vacuum cleaners have made this process intuitive and easy to use, especially when it comes to more popular and well-known brands.
Use a magnetic border strip
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Some older or very cheap vacuums give you hardware or manual options to ban the robot vacuum from a certain area.
In the package you can find a roll of flat plastic material; this is the magnetic boundary strip. This is a physical and visible way of delineating where your robot vacuum cleaner should not go and for this reason is not ideal. This magnetic border strip is usually quite thick and needs double-sided tape to hold it in place. If you don’t do it right, it can become a tripping hazard, but at best it’s a simple and effective barrier that your robot vacuum won’t cross. Because it can be unsightly, many robot vacuum companies have phased it out in favor of other options.
Robot vacuum cleaner ‘Lighthouses’
Small battery-powered devices known as virtual wall lights (VWLHs) used to be included with some older robot vacuums like the iRobot Roomba, and you can still come across them if you shop for a used robot on Craigslist. These beacons are small cylinders placed around the house or on doorways that use invisible infrared light to block off areas you don’t want your robot to access.
In some cases, these devices can be turned on to create an infrared gate, allowing you to control the bot’s entry into the space. Those beacons have largely been phased out now that the new mapping technology is more robust, and that mapping technology is also appearing on increasingly cheaper and more affordable robot vacuums and mops.
Of course, you can close the doors in your home, use baby gates, or create a guard line of heavy cans to prevent your robot vacuum from getting into trouble. But we prefer to use the magic of technology to keep our army of cleaning robots on task — and out of trouble. If you need help choosing the right bot for your home, read some tips on how to choose a robotic vacuum cleaner.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn