Yeedi Vac 2 Pro review: this vacuuming and mopping robot has high-end features for a lower price

If you like the idea of a robot that can clean and mop your floors but don't like having to clean up before it runs, Yeedi has a bot for you. The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro can vacuum and mop at the same time. It can get through the job without being derailed by a pair of shoes, because it avoids mopping your carpets and has 3D obstacle avoidance.

The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro and Yeedi Vac 2 are both $349 and have obstacle detection, but only a standard mopping system with no carpet avoidance. The Pro has a longer battery life and can work with Yeedi's auto-empty bin.

The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro does a good job at vacuuming and mopping, but it still costs $450, and I have spent a week or so with it. You can get up to $650 with the auto-empty base. If you have some cash left over, you can buy a decent manual mop for that amount of money. The Yeedi is a good robot with some high-end features for a lower price, but it isn't cheap enough or smart enough to really disrupt the big boys.

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I like Yeedi's very budget robots, such as the $179.99 Yeedi K650. It does a simple job. There is no obstacle avoidance or room specific cleaning, but it has a huge bin, and it really sucks up the dirt as it bumps and rolls around your house. By jumping up into the robot vacuum arena where smart mapping, obstacle avoidance, and oscillating mopping are playing, the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro is punching above its weight, and while it holds its own on the hardware front, the mapping/software experience is lackluster.

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The new Yeedi has an action that scrubs your floors rather than just wiping them, which is the best feature. This worked out well, as it left my floors much cleaner than most standard robot vac mops. It has a cheap-feeling, thin scrap of a mopping pad that doesn't seem to stand up to more than a couple of washes and doesn't come with any extra pads, so you can buy replacements for $20 for a three-pack. You need to refill the water on every run.

The Yeedi can now auto-avoid carpeted areas when mopping, and this is a standard feature on a lot of mopping vacs today. If you want to vacuum your carpets, you have to remove the mopping tank. If you have a lot of rugs or carpets you also want to keep clean, you are less likely to use the mopping feature. Lifting the mop when going over carpet is a way to address this. The Yeedi is used to dry the mop while charging, and you have to remove it after every mopping run.

The best feature of the new Yeedi is its oscillating mopping action

The Yeedi vacuum has 3000Pa of power and a big 5,200mAh battery that will last over three hours, which is comparable to most top-of-the-line models. It never ran for more than an hour in testing and returned with a low battery. The Yeedi did a good job of cleaning my house and covering most of my floor. It sometimes skipped large areas for no obvious reason.

Its navigation and mapping tech is to blame. Most high-end robot vacuums use lidar-based SLAM mapping to determine where your rooms are. Yeedi uses a camera on top of the robot for navigation, which is cheaper and less precise. The SLAM mapping didn't properly identify the rooms in my house and it was difficult to see the wider doorways.

After two tries, the robot could only find two rooms in my five-room, 800- square-foot downstairs area. It thought I lived in one giant room after its first run. Digital keep-out zones, areas I don't want the robot to go to, are another necessity on any decent robot vacuum. Yeedi says multi-floor mapping is coming, but you can only have one map at the moment.

I was able to manually create rooms and use the room specific cleaning features after Yeedi pushed a software update that added the ability to divide and merge rooms on the map. The navigation smarts failed it a few times, with the robot missing an entire room a couple of times and ending the cleaning job before it had reached everywhere.

Obstacle avoidance is less effective than other technologies. The robot uses 3D structured light technology to detect items that are over an inch tall, so floor mats, cables, pencils, and your kitty won't be avoided. It does well at avoiding bigger items, such as a pair of shoes or a school backpack, but it tripped up when it had pencils, headphones, cables, and socks.

The Yeedi is good at navigating around things and can do it without difficulty. It's one of the only bot vacs I've tested that has figured out how to get out of my lounge chair trap. I could hear its motor getting louder and quieter as it tried to navigate its way around the problem, finally freeing itself after a few minutes. If you want to make sure the robot finishes its run, you have to tidy up a bit more.

Concerns about how the data they collect is protected are brought about by bringing connected devices into your home. The company whose smart home products we review has safeguards in place for your data.

The maps and image data from the onboard navigation camera are the primary home data a robot vacuum like the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro collects. The Yeedi app can be used to remove the maps from the device, as well as to clear the data with a factory reset. The company says the device's camera is only used for improving cleaning efficiency and no photos are uploaded to the cloud.

Yeedi's privacy policy states that the robot collects information about how and when the product is used, as well as information about the cleaning environment.

The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro works with Yeedi's self-empty station for emptying the bin, an add-on I highly recommend for anyone considering a robot vacuum. Yeedi says that the robot can empty its own bin into a bag that will hold about 30 days of dust, and it costs $17 for three replacement bags. You just pull out the self-sealing bag and throw it away. The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro is a lot more expensive because of this.

The Yeedi's auto-empty station worked well in testing, but I had to help it out once because the bin was really full. The process is very loud and takes about 20 seconds. The Yeedi auto-empty station is only for dust and can't empty or refill the mop reservoir. Before and after every mopping session, you need to do that yourself.

Yeedi's app has seen a lot of improvements since I first tried it a couple of years ago. Slow loading and poor spelling are some of the things that it still has. The main features you want are room-specific cleaning, clean zones, and the option to set a cleaning sequence.

The robot is quiet on the lowest setting and I always use the highest setting for the best clean. You can turn on continuous cleaning so that it will go back to its base if it needs to finish a job, and there is a handy Do Not Disturb setting.

Obstacle avoidance is less effective compared to more expensive competitors

Some of the features of the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro, such as mapping, are not as well-executed as those on the iRobots and the Roborocks. This is a budget bot, and for $200 less than the nearest comparable competitor, it might suit you.

If you step up to the Roborock, your robot will be able to vacuum and mop your floors and carpets in one go. If you can eliminate robot mopping, the Roomba i3 is $100 cheaper and delivers a better clean and significantly better experience, but it doesn't have obstacle avoidance. Ecovacs has a number of similar options at different price points, but it also suffers from accuracy issues, as I noted in my review of its flagship robot vacuum. If you have a budget of $450 for a robot vacuum, you really want a mop that can scrub and won't get stuck, and don't care about super-accurate mapping, the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro will get the job done.

The photos were taken by Jenifer Pattison Tuohy.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it. It is impossible for us to read and analyze all of these agreements. We started counting how many times you have to agree to use devices when we review them.

You need to register for a Yeedi account with an email address to use the Yeedi Home app.

You get two mandatory agreements.