Robot mops for large rooms, gyms or similar (3)

After testing several robot mops (posting 1) iRobots Roomba did the job (posting 2).

A Roomba Max 705 is running in our gym and after the first weeks here some findings (if you want to run such a robot mop in a large hall/gym/etc.

By the way cleaning a space with >200m² is no problem:

And access routes with >30m to the room, where the robot should clean work as well:

But to get there, the following things have to be considered:

• If your gym has floor-to-ceiling mirrors: You have to cover the mirrors during mapping phase. Otherwise Roomba calculates the room larger than it is and if another room is behind the mirror, it will create doors/openings which are not there...
• Gym walls are typically uniform - and with an empty gym the robot has not landmarks to navigate. So you have to put some stickers on the wall. (Consider the robot is far away from the edges and sees with the lidar only the wall and the camera can not recognize anymore, that is moving forward... the robot can not distinguish if it is slippery or stuck or still moving).
• If you want to mop your gym at night: the stickers should reflect light - in darkness Roomba switches on its LED, so reflectors will guide the robot
  

The video shows that problem quite well - a smartphone camera is may be better than the camera of the Roomba and you can imagine that the robot is really a little bit lost. But if you move down to the level of the robot, the light of the LED is reflected for the smartphone camera as well, and the the landmarks are clearly visible.

By the way: after you created the landmarks you have to run the mapping again, so these landmarks are stored in the map (i created them after the first mapping and it helped but Roomba did not find its way everytime. After mapping the gym again it is now running without any failure.)