How close is “hands-free” cleaning to actually hands-free?
Obstacle avoidance, thresholds, dock maintenance, stuck events, cleaning follow-up and smart-feature premiums.
Multiple hands-on tests support a low-maintenance ownership story, while also showing mopping misses and occasional rescue events. That makes it a useful Set-and-Forget benchmark.
Independent testing is unusually revealing: the core vacuum is capable, while the headline arm has struggled with basic object handling and adds battery/software complexity.
Independent lab-style testing gives useful cross-model evidence. The current picture is strong obstacle/threshold handling with cleaning trade-offs by surface.
Official support pages expose the kinds of failure modes that matter—station return, maps, charging, obstacle avoidance—but they are troubleshooting evidence, not failure-rate evidence.
The official support library is valuable because it reveals the maintenance/error surface, but we still lack comparable independent long-term frequencies.
Independent review evidence directly challenges the “hands-free” promise: cleaning can be strong while software behavior remains temperamental.
A hands-on PCWorld test found excellent navigation and strong hard-floor vacuuming, but sticky stain cleanup still required human finishing—an unusually clean example of “smart feature ≠ chore eliminated.”