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I have no prior experience with cleaning robots, so this review is based solely on my experience with the Roomba 880 and is probably more geared towards people that actually have pets and are trying to keep the hairy mess down.This robot deserves a thorough review, but here’s the quick synopsis if you don't want to read it all: I love it, would buy it again. There's a learning curve to use it efficiently, but I would not want to live without it anymore, it has made my life so much easier and cleaner! Maintaining the robot is easy and fast and it does fine on all surfaces it encounters in my house, including under couches and beds. It cleans for up to 2 hours daily. It is not “set it and forget it” – get a cleaning lady if that is what you want.Here is my experience with this little helpful machine for those interested:Out of the box, I thought that while the instructions weren't the best, they were certainly sufficient to get me started. However, when it comes to how to actually place the virtual walls and lighthouses, the instructions are not terribly helpful and it helped me to watch the robot a few times to get used to best placement.I have about 2000 square foot to clean on my main floor, and it is a mix of linoleum, hardwood floors, large and small area rugs and tiles. The hardwood is about 3/4 inch raised above the linoleum and some area rugs are thick (so the robot has to "climb"). I have a constantly shedding yellow lab, as well as a dark haired cat. So, basically, I had to either vacuum every day or accept that there are some dust bunnies during the days I don't get to it. Now I use my upright vacuum only on the rugs, maybe every other week! Because of the rather large area, I have also purchased some extra virtual walls/lighthouses, so I can better tell the robot where I want it to clean. But my main floor has lots of openings and angles, and I think additional lighthouse/wall units may not be necessary for those with a very open floor plan (two units are included with the robot). My robot is programmed to clean daily while I'm at work during the week and during the afternoon on the weekend. Programming was really easy. To deal with the large area with different amounts of traffic, I switch my lighthouses from the "lighthouse" to the "wall" function a couple of times a week to have certain zones cleaned more often than others. Sometimes I also take the robot to clean an area after I get home from work, if the robot happened to not go in that area that day and I want it to clean there.How does it clean? Well, I think it does a very nice job of keeping the floors at an exceptional level of cleanliness for a pet household. If you have pets that shed, you will appreciate not having to vacuum every day. There will be *some* pet hair left behind in areas that didn't happen to be vacuumed much that day, but quite honestly, it is so minimal that I would argue that maybe you should have a goldfish instead of a dog or cat if that amount of pet hair bothers you. It is basically never more a few stray hairs here and there if you look really close.The unit is not whisper-quiet. Although not terribly loud, it makes enough noise to bug me if it is cleaning in the same room while I’m watching TV or trying to sleep. However, mostly it is running while I’m away anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. My cat and dog don’t mind the robot at all after the initial “WTF?” reaction. My dog got very excited and kept watching and following the robot around initially. Now he doesn’t even move out of the way for it and is recognized as an object if he decides to stand his ground. The cat just kind of doesn’t care to be very close to the robot while it is cleaning, but isn’t really scared of it, either. He just walks around the robot at a bit of a distance. But I have a brave cat that chases and plays with my 82 pound lab while he’s spinning in circles of his happy play dance, so who knows, your cat may go hide or hiss at the robot.Contrary to my initial belief, the robot DOES not "map" or "learn" the specific room. Instead, it uses routines (aka programmed behaviors), making “decisions” based on how it bumps into something (e.g. angle) and how often. For example, there are routines for wall following, circling around chair legs, going diagonally across the room, turning around in different angles when it gets in a tight place, and cleaning a spot it deems very dirty in sort of like a star shaped pattern. Due to these various routines, the robot will not go in straight lines back and forth across the area as one would manually with a vacuum cleaner. Expect it to appear random. It is, but because of this it ends up covering the whole area eventually. I have, however, noticed that certain areas do indeed end up getting more cleaning if they happen to induce a certain routine repeatedly due to the location of obstacles.The robot detects walls and slows down before bumping into them, but can’t do that for narrow objects like chair legs or corners. It bumps into those at full speed. It is strong enough to push a small wooden plant stand that has an artificial plant on it out of its place a little bit at a time, so don’t leave something tippy on a tall, light stand if you can avoid it.Dog toys are not a problem (unless you have a tiny lapdog and equally tiny toys). The robot pushes past soft objects carefully at low speed (including bed skirts and such). It did try to eat a thin arm on a dog toy once, stopped, and needed rescuing.The dirt detection I believe is based mostly on color difference (optical), and I have read that some dark area rugs may cause issues and get the robot to keep doing it’s spot cleaning routine. I have not encountered this problem, though. I’m not sure about “acoustical” dirt sensing mentioned here on Amazon. Maybe when the dirt is “crunchy”??? (There is a round metallic window in the middle of the vacuum channel, so that possibly “hears” when dirt hits it, but who knows?) On hard floors larger debris might get “kicked around” a bit if it happens to be at the very edge of the robot’s spinning side brush. It usually is picked up eventually, though.I don’t know if the cliff (stairs) detection works, I have not needed that in my house. I also have never used the remote control. I don’t find it useful for anything, really. Maybe I should try it out in a rescue operation if the robot ever decides to stop cleaning while it is under a bed. I don’t know if it will turn on remotely, though. I’ll give that a try some day.Here are some of the lessons learned in terms of setup and upkeep during the past three months with the robot:Placement of charging station and virtual walls/lighthouses:1) Put the charging station for the robot in the middle of the house with additional zones off of that. Do not “daisy-chain”. Reason: The robot will not return to the charging station in the starting zone (1) if it has to go from zone 3 THROUGH zone 2 to get back to zone 1 to charge (i.e. lighthouses in connecting between connecting rooms). Customer service has confirmed this. I struggled with this before I figured out what is going on. I initially had the robot on one end of the house (kitchen) and wanted it to clean the living room and the master bedroom connected to the living room in stages by using the included two lighthouses. I kept finding the robot out of battery or simply switched off in the bedroom. Now, sith the charger location in the middle of the house, the robot cleans the living room first, and then goes either into the kitchen, the bedroom area, or the library, depending on where it happened to be when the lighthouses switch to “pass”. After cleaning that secondary room, it goes back to zone 1, and, if the docking routine has not yet come on, it goes to the next zone and back to zone 1 after it is done. This way it now cleans up to three zones off of the living room without issues.2) Do not put the charging station (zone 1) behind a thin wall that separates it from another zone the robot might want to return from to charge after a cleaning cycle. The robot will keep going to that area behind the wall to try to return to the charge station, but, of course, it can't! It will probably run out of battery unless it happens to go through the actual door opening during one of its random routines. It is better to have the charging station on a wall away from physical walls of other zones. My charging station is on the wall of a stairwell, so no zones are directly behind the wall. I have had no problems since I moved it there.3) Virtual walls and lighthouses emit a cone-shaped beam along the floor that gets wider further from the units. This beam either keeps the robot from crossing or allows it through. I have learned it is better to put the virtual wall or lighthouse behind the door frame or opening, slightly angled into the zone that is being "corded off". This way the robot finds the way back more easily because the beam goes into the secondary zone and the robot “sees” it more easily. The lighthouse does not work like a wireless emitter “calling” the robot – the robot actually has to get very close to the beam to detect it during one of its routines and will then be allowed to pass through the beam if the allotted time has passed.4) It is also a good idea to point the beam towards a wall away from the direction the robot may come from, otherwise it might not clean the area next to the beam (only when it crosses to the next zone). If two virtual walls/lighthouses have to be close to each other to close off an area, have them point away from each other. Otherwise the robot may get confused and stuck.5) Virtual walls (the ones that cannot be switched to lighthouse function) appear to have a longer beam, making them better for closing off very wide openings. I think the widest I have to cover with the virtual wall is about 14 feet, which the lighthouses can’t seem to reach all the way across.Robot-friendly setup:1) Remove clutter, cords and light accent rugs or bath mats from the floor where possible. While the robot does not seem to have a problem with normal power cords, I have heard that it can get tangled in thin cables like cell phone chargers and such. At the very least it is a waste of good battery time to navigate itself off of cord messes. It may also eventually damage the rollers if stuff gets in there all the time. Thin bath mats and accent rugs (non-plush, non-rubber-backed, towel-like) get pushed around and corners may get tangled and stop the robot. Other objects are not usually an issue, but do slow the robot’s work down and waste battery time.2) Cleaning time is determined by room size, which the robot determines by how many times it bumps into something while randomly running its routines. So if you have a room with lots of clutter, it may not clean very long even if you only use one zone or it is a closed off room. It just decides the room only needs a shorter cleaning cycle (because it is “small” based on the number of “walls”) and returns to the docking station. So get rid of clutter on the floor that doesn’t need to be there. I’m pretty bad about leaving things on the floor and having the robot around has made me be better about that! Paper sheets definitely can get stuck. I encountered the robot trying to consume sheet music once. It choked on it, though.Total cleaning time:1) If more than one zone is used, the maximum time spent on one zone is about 25 minutes before the robot would be allowed to cross into the next zone during its random routines (less time is possible if the room is small or cluttered). This is a built-in routine that the normal user can't change. The total amount of cleaning time depends on how far away from the docking station the robot happens to be when the “dock” routine comes on and how fast the series of random routines gets the robot close to the lighthouse separating the secondary zone from zone 1. I don’t know at what particular battery charge level the dock routine happens (for me it has usually been after about 80 to 90 minutes or so). I have seen the robot clean for a maximum of 2 hours before it went back to the charger, but have also seen it back in the charger right after the docking routine came on.2) If one zone needs more cleaning than others, just switch the lighthouses to walls a couple of times a week to reduce the area the robot has to cover. In my house the living room needs to be cleaned most often, as that is where my dog seems to take residence when I'm at work. So the living room is zone 1, and a couple of times a week I make this the only zone the robot cleans by switching the lighthouses going to other zones to walls (thus increasing cleaning time in the living room).Cleaning/upkeep:1) Start with vacuumed floors - otherwise you will be cleaning the robot's bin multiple times during the first few runs if you have pet hair accumulated on the floor. I also vacuum my area rugs about every other week with my regular vacuum for a more targeted cleaning.2) If you have shedding pets like I do - make it a habit to clean both bin and filter every day, even if the red "bin full" light is not on after the first cleaning cycle. My cleaning procedure: remove the bin from the robot; grab any hair stuck at the entrance of the vacuum channel of the robot, dump out the collected debris from the robot’s bin in a trash can. Remove the filter from the collection bin, tap it on the top edge of the trash can to get most of the stuck dusty material off, then use my handheld vacuum (hanging on the wall right next to the trash can) to remove fine dust from the filter. Reinstall filter in the bin and then the bin in the robot. The whole thing takes no more than 1 minute – I’m sure of that, I do it in the time my dog eats his dinner – you know what I mean! If the bin isn't cleaned every day, the robot may start occasionally leaving some pet hair behind in little heaps on the rugs. This happens because the vacuum channel gets backed up as the bin gets filled. The filter cleaning really helps keeping the suction to work efficiently, don't skip that. I have not yet had to replace the first Hepa filter that came with the robot in the past three months. It is a bit discolored from the dust, but still works well due to the daily cleaning with the handheld.3) About every other week, I open up the bottom and take any collected hair from the ends of the rollers. It is nicely coiled up and comes off easily. I read cleaning hair from brushes used to be a major chore with the previous brush-type models, but it is absolutely no problem with these rubber rollers. Some hair also gets trapped in the well of the front wheel, which comes out easily with a gentle tug to clean. When I clean the rollers, I also wipe down the clear sensor windows along the bottom edge of the robot, the vacuum channel and I give the top a good wipe as well. Occasionally the vacuum channel gets caked with dried on dirt (happens when my dog leaves water slurps somewhere other than around his dog bowl, which is protected by a virtual wall, by the way). The caked on dust removes easily with a paper towel.Other notes:1) Very thick area rugs or floor runners (shag type and such) generally do not get vacuumed much since most of the time the robot runs up to the edge and thinks it hit an obstacle. Sometimes it will go on these types of rugs, depending on the angle it approaches the rug at. It doesn't seem to get in trouble for getting on these types of rugs, but it will act a bit labored. If a thick area rug is next to a cabinet with a few inches in between, I have found that occasionally the robot gets stuck because one of the side wheels is hovering just above the floor as the robot tips slightly by the time it is about halfway off the rug and hits the cabinet. In this case it may need rescuing.2) I had to put some light sewing machine oil on the front wheel once when it was starting to squeak a little after I had the robot about a month. I have not had the problem since.