As reported the other day, I got me one of those low-cost floor cleaning robots from the German coffee chain Tchibo. This floor cleaning robot looks similar to the Roomba robot, but has no vacuum function. This robot cleans just by brushing the floor, still at $110 (89,90 Euros) I thought I give it spin.

Taking it out of the box things where still good. The red floor robot has decent looks and the manufacturing quality seems alright too. The easy to understand manual told me to charge the robot for 12 hours. The next day, after switching the Tchibo robot on and selecting one of the 3 room cleaning programs (small, medium and large room) the robot started to disappoint.
First I was still laughing as the robot confirmed the mode selection with a 5 second Chinese toy sounding melody. After doing this 3 times I got sick of it. It is just crazy to have such a cheap and ugly sound effect in a product that is positioned in a modern futuristic life style segment. Anyway lets focus on the main question, can this low-cost robot clean? The answer is not really. I tried it on hardwood floors and on tiles.
The results are not satisfying at all. My wife was just shaking her head, watching the robot driving around for 10 min. in the kitchen and redistributing the dust. Corners and edges stay dirty, as the robot is not getting close enough to the walls. So for me this is not saving any time cleaning. Additionally this floor cleaning robot also makes quite some noise driving around, so you cannot watch TV in the same room as the TV commercials suggested.
The driving pattern itself is actually ok. It gets almost everywhere and also chairs and table legs are not a real problem. The issue is that even if it's covering the whole room, the dirt pickup is just not good enough and lots of dirt stays behind. I believe that a strong vacuum function is essential for a floor cleaning robot.
I am back to cleaning myself and Tchibo moved also on to sell this week accessories for organized living - floor cleaning robots have been hip last week.