The word 'fully automatic' depends on who's maintaining it

iRobot pushed its AutoWash self-cleaning base down to the entry line, and my first reaction was: whose job did this thing just take over?

A vacuum-mop combo plus a self-cleaning base — the official line is that it frees your hands. While going through reviews I noticed one detail: a lot of people are comparing whose base station chassis is easier to clean. That comparison itself says something. Whether the mop-washing water drains through the chassis, whether the mop dries properly — it all ends up in the same place: the base station gets dirty on its own, and who deals with it? In the Roomba Home App there's an option to check the robot's health status — schedule, map, status, you have to go in and look yourself. The device reports; it doesn't decide for you.

Those few AGVs in our warehouse have been running for two months. Wheeled chassis plus loop-closure detection — the hardware cost is limited. What's actually expensive is nobody watching it, and that still hasn't been solved today. One more machine means one more thing you have to go check on regularly.

So my take on this kind of entry-level fully-automatic combo is: what it saves is the money for buying the machine, not a single bit of the attention for maintenance. The boundary of full automation is how long you can go without looking at it before something goes wrong. Two weeks or two months depends on whose head that base station's chores ultimately land on.