Xenia, our robot vacuum

Robot vacuum cleaners are a great help in housekeeping but all have one downside: they cannot walk the stairs.

Our Xiaomi Robot Vacuum 1S, which features a pleasant female voice and is therefore called Xenia, perfectly manages cleaning of one specific floor in our house.

Unfortunately, she’s afraid of stairs:

But otherwise Xenia is a brilliant robot being.

In the very beginning I’ve had some trouble getting it connected to the mobile app, which refused to find the device, but that was solved by resetting it with the Reset button.

Our Xenia is self-sufficient and thorough, and she reliably finds the charging station once she’s done cleaning.

But what’s really impressive is the floor map she makes while rolling around the house, a quite precise one:

You can even recognise a five-legged office chair in the bottom room.

Something even more peculiar: the sector of space behind the charging station (top left corner) is a mirror stashed behind our bed (the charger is located under the bed). Xenia’s lidar identifies the mirror as an open yet inaccessible space, which she finds annoying as I can imagine.

This robot cleaner is available on AliExpress. I was fortunate enough to be able to order it from a warehouse in Spain so that I didn’t have to pay the usual customs duties since the item was shipped within the EU. ■