Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Affordable alternative to more expensive options from the likes of Narwal and Roborock
- Scrubs stains and sticky gunk from hard-surface floors
- Self-cleans its mop pad and auto-empties its dustbin
Cons
- Hair tends to get tangled around its roller brush
- Sometimes has trouble avoiding obstacles
Our Verdict
The Yeedi Cube delivers a mostly hands-free floor-cleaning experience without the accompanying sticker shock you’ll encounter with many competing brands.
Just as Yeedi offered an affordable alternative to premium-priced self-emptying vacuums with its earlier Vac Station (available for around $500/ €300), it’s now doing the same for hybrid bots with self-cleaning mops. With a $700/€699.99 list price, the Yeedi Cube is the company’s budget-friendly take on similar products by Ecovacs and Roborock. Like those products, the Cube can vacuum and mop floors and then clean itself with minimal user intervention.
It’s not yet available from Amazon in the UK, but you can buy it from Amazon in Germany and have it shipped over.
There are some differences between the Cube and rivals. Yeedi’s base station is noticeably squatter and it also bucks design trends by including only a dirty-water tank in the base station along with its auto-empty dust bag. Clean water is stored in a separate water tank on the robot itself.
As a robot mop, the Yeedi Cube loosened and removed stains, sticky gunk, and embedded grime that other hybrid cleaners struggle with.
Dubbed the UFO water tank because of its saucer shape, it has a 1L capacity and slots into the top of the Cube’s robot. A rubber handle is affixed to the top of the tank to both help remove it for filling and to make it easier to tote the robot around your home, whether to clean a different floor or an isolated spill.
Its quirky design aside, the Yeedi Cube turned out to be just as effective a cleaner, if not quite as polished, as its much-higher-priced counterparts.
The Yeedi Cube can be toted around your home by its handle.
Michael Ansaldo/IDG
Yeedi Cube mopping performance
To prepare for a mopping run, press the lock button on the UFO water tank and push back. This pushes the handle upward so you can grab it and remove the tank. Fill the tank with fresh water, cap the valve, and reinstall the tank on top of the robot. You’ll also need to attach the microfiber cloth to the mopping attachment on the bottom of the robot.
This robot offers only two cleaning modes: vacuum only and vacuum and then mop in tandem. Choose the latter and then select suction and water levels; there are three of each. From there you just start auto-cleaning to clean the entire mapped space, or you can carry the robot to a specific area and select spot cleaning.
The Cube doesn’t merely drag a dampened cloth across the floor as many hybrid robot cleaners do. It uses ultrasonic vibration to scrub the floor 2,500 times per minute for intense deep cleaning without leaving water streaks behind. Its mop holder also employs a floating design that allows it to automatically calibrate and adjust its angle to match the floor surface. In my testing, this enabled it to loosen and remove stains, sticky gunk, and embedded grime that other hybrid cleaners struggle with.
The Yeedi Cube’s clean-water tank attatches to the top of the robot.
Michael Ansaldo/IDG
When a mopping job is complete, the robot returns to its base station where the electric scrubber cleans the pad using a back-and-forth motion using 10 N (Newtons) of force. At the same time, the dustbin’s contents are automatically emptied.
Yeedi Cube vacuuming performance
The Cube is much more conventional as a vacuum. It uses a pair of spinning side brushes and a rubber-and-bristles roller brush to sweep and suck debris into its dustbin. Many of the robot vacuums I’ve tested recently have moved to an all-rubber roller—in some cases, a pair of them—as they mitigate hair tangles and make sure the hair makes it to the dustbin.
The Cube’s handling of the dog and cat hair on my floors underscores the wisdom of that approach; this and other fibrous debris almost always ended up wrapped around the Yeedi Cube’s roller and threaded into its bristles, requiring a lot of hands-on intervention to clear. The robot had no problem removing dirt, dust, and food crumbs from my home’s hard floor surfaces and a few area rugs, though, and it generally left my floors, from open areas to edges, completely clean.
Yeedi claims a suction power of 5100pA and it can be adjusted between three different levels: Quiet, Normal, and Max. Suction is automatically boosted when the robot detects carpet. The robot’s 360ml onboard dustbin automatically empties into a 2.1L dustbin whenever it returns to the base station.
Yeedi Cube navigation
The Yeedi Cube uses SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) laser-aided navigation for mapping and obstacle avoidance. This incorporates a top-mounted camera that enables the robot to create and continually update a map of its environment and its place within it, and it has a front-mounted infrared sensor to detect obstacles.
The Yeedi app enables easy control and delivers plenty of configuration and customization options.
Michael Ansaldo/IDG
The Cube created an accurate, if basic, map of my home’s downstairs level during its first cleaning run. It quickly recognized various obstacles in my living room and kitchen, but it didn’t always do a great job of avoiding those obstacles. The robot bumped into table and chair legs several times and once passed so close to a shoe that it ensnared its laces in one of its edge brushes. It seemed as if once recognizing these objects, it simply didn’t give them a wide enough berth.
Overall though, the robot moved in efficient straight lines and never got into a jam that stopped its progress or required me to rescue it. It generally was able to clean all the accessible areas of my downstairs level in less than 20 minutes.
Yeedi app experience
The Yeedi companion app has a simple, clean design. Your floor plan’s map is front and center, with cleaning stats displayed across the top and the robot’s and base station’s controls along the bottom.
The app makes it easy to customize your floor cleaning. Maps can be edited to add room divisions and mergers, room names, and no-clean and no-mop zones. You can tailor cleaning settings for each room, set cleaning sequences, and create cleaning schedules. It’s also easy to configure features such as carpet detection and auto-boost suction.
Verdict
If you want to experience the luxury of (mostly) hands-free floor cleaning without paying a luxury price, the Yeedi cube is well worth considering. Although everything here is just a little less refined than with the higher-priced competing products, the result—cleaner floors with less labor—will surely leave you satisfied.
But if this isn’t the right model for you, have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested for buying links, quick summaries including the pros and cons of each model, and links to in-depth reviews.
This review was first published on TechHive.
Yeedi Cube specifications
- Cleaning modes: vacuum and mop
- Charging dock type: auto-clean station
- Navigation: SLAM laser-aided navigation
- Suction: 5,100Pa
- Dustbin capacity: 360ml onboard, 2.1L in base station
- Mopping type: microfiber cloth with ultrasonic vibration
- Water tank capacity: Fresh-water tank: 1L, dirty-water tank: 1.2L
- Carpet detection: Yes
- App control: Android and iOS
- Voice control: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri