Bought a powerbot VR9350 this week and after having trouble creating a floor plan and looking online, this post was the closest to the same questions I had. I now have answers so thought I'd share. My main issue was the battery life. I tried moving the charging base, closing off smaller rooms, and closely watching "Bob" as we call him, roll back and forth through the house. He'd never complete the floorplan. The question I had was, would be find the charging station, recharge and continue where he left off if he ran out of battery during the floorplan creation model. The answer is definitely YES! I had this happen successfully twice now. Several times the powerbot would get to the very last room of mapping and run Into a paper clip, small Lego, or something and abort with a power brush error. As soon as this happens the floorplan is lost and the process must be restarted. This is highly annoying. I felt like it should be able to pick back up where it left off after clearing the brush. We have a large, open floorplan, single story home and I really wanted the ability to call the vacuum to clean just a single room so the floorplan was essential. Now that I've gotten one, I have some suggestions that might help. 1 - while creating the floorplan, pick EVERYTHING up off the floor before beginning. Even vacuuming rooms with carpet before hand with a regular vacuum would ensure there's nothing left to stop or get caught in the brush of the powerbot. 2- I'd even pick up things you will normally leave down such as trash cans, chairs, magazine racks, etc to ensure the powerbot doesn't get stuck during mapping and not be able to find his way out. During normal operation you can just rescue it, but during mapping you will be forced to restart the while process from the beginning! 3- start with a full battery! But remember the powerbot should find it's station and resume once fully charged. I did have an instance where it couldn't find it's station. I don't know if using the remote to guide it back would have lost the floorplan but I do know that picking it up to move it will as that's what I did! 4- Consider the direction you'd like the vacuum to roll in your house (up and back or side to side across the room). Whichever way you think works best, orient the charger in that direction as it seems to make a difference. We have 18" tiles in a standard grid pattern in all but the bedrooms. When I placed the charger one way it would vacuum in strips across the house AND in every room. When I reorientated the charging station to face longways it used long up and back strips which I think is more efficient for our home setup which is more long than wide. The rooms now also get up and back strips rather than strips across the rooms width wise. Now that I finally have a floorplan (that looks strikingly similar to our actual layout!) I am excited to use this on a regular basis. It really is amazing technology and works generally really well. I even have the base underneath a sofa table in the back of our room so it's invisible and it finds the charger every time. Hope this helps someone!
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