(NEW!) Shark (AV2001WD) AI Robot Vacuum & Mop

I bought the Shark Vacmop Pro RV2001WD after a not-very-positive experience with the Roborock S6 Pure (see my separate review of that unit). The two units have comparable features. Setting up the Shark app was not pleasant. I ended up phoning their technical support line several times. I received incorrect information, got transferred to the wrong department, and the like. One thing was true though, I was told the app is "under development," and it shows. It looks very much like a 1.0 version product. (For future reference, if you need to delete the map, do a factory reset of the robo-vac. I had to do this several times.) I admit I was spoiled by the Roborock app and mapping function. The Shark's is nothing like it. While eventually functional, the Shark app shows everything in monochromatic gray. It said I had something like 18 rooms (ha ha ha!) but some were just three feet square. This is the first run. A second run is for carpet detection, but the resulting patterns were nothing like the rooms and looked like a crazy X-acto knife robot got loose! The resulting map was all gray with all kinds of marks/tags and no indication of what they meant. I ended up deleting all the rooms and carpet areas and re-doing it manually. While the maps can be edited, the editing function is touchy and non-intuitive. No-go zones can be created, and they are necessary because the object detection/avoidance of the Shark is not as good as the Roborock's. I wanted to run a performance comparison of the Shark and Roborock robo-vacs because of my experience with the Roborock. First look at the size of the suction hole in the first two pictures. While the Shark's extends the length of the roller brush and sweeps the dirt horizontally into the vacuum air stream, the Roborock suction hole is located near the top of the roller brush cavity and is so small it can be covered by three George Washington quarters! This also means the Roborock vacuum has to lift the dirt vertically an inch or two, which requires much more power (and that it didn't do very well). I ran a performance test comparing the Shark Vacmop Pro RV2001WD and the Roborock S6 Pure. Both units were set to Maximum for the test. I had been using both units alternating days for a week before I started this test. In a single day I ran four cleaning cycles, Roborock-Shark-Roborock-Shark, one after the other, letting the batteries recharge before starting the second cleaning run. The results were shocking. I weighed the dirt in each vacuum's dust chamber using a bullion scale, weighing the chamber before and after vacuuming (they were both cleaned before each test). See the photos showing the dirt collected in each cleaning pass. Pass #1 Roborock: 2.6 grams Pass #2 Shark: 6.0 g Pass #3 Roborock: 1.3 g Pass #4 Shark: 3.0 g Even though the Shark cleaned immediately *after* the Roborock, in both cases the Shark pulled up over twice as much dirt as the Roborock did just beforehand!! I ran a third pair of passes the next morning and the pattern repeated (there was so little dirt in the Roborock that I couldn't weigh it). The difference is mostly due to the Shark suction hole being so much larger, and only having to sweep the dirt horizontally into the vacuum air stream (no vertical lifting of dirt). This is a design flaw with the Roborock that can't be overcome with a battery powered vacuum. Wall-powered vacuum cleaners generate huge amounts of vacuum compared to these robot-vacs, and the cleaning brushes are larger and driven by much stronger motors. In the Shark unit there is a fine mesh plastic screen in front of the air filter. This filter captures most of the fine dust particles to keep them from clogging the air filter. This is good. See the photos. But bad is that the mesh screen is held in place with a screw so you need either a tool to remove it for cleaning, or to use compressed air to blow off the dust/dirt. Also, cleaning out the dust chamber of the Shark requires using your fingers (or something) to pull out the carpet fuzz/pet hair trapped above the mesh screen. In contrast with the Roborock that you can just bang the small dust chamber on the side of your trash can to knock out most of the dirt. And lastly, the battery on the Shark is only 2600mAh compared to the Roborock's 5200mAh battery. The Shark was barely able to finish cleaning (~10% left). On the positive, the Shark does have a recharge-and-resume option so if it runs out of power it will return to the dock, recharge, and then resume cleaning where it left off. I tried this and it seemed to kick in when the battery was at about the 30% charge level. In summary, the Shark Vacmop Pro RV2001WD is a solidly designed unit with really poor software. It needs a larger battery, and a better dust chamber design to make emptying it easier.