Robot vacuums have gotten a lot better over the years, performing more and more tasks autonomously. Nowadays, we have robovacs that can capably avoid wires, empty their own dust bins, and even clean itself while on the dock. You know what these cleaning robots can’t do, though? They can’t climb stairs, which means you physically move them from one floor to another if you want it to clean your whole house. The Migo Ascender just might be the robot vacuum to change that.
Touted as the “world’s first stair climbing vacuum,” the device comes with folding legs on the sides that allow it to climb a flight of stairs, giving it the ability to clean multiple floors without any human interference. Even better, it will clean the stairs as it climbs, which should further minimize the amount of human input necessary to keep your floor’s clean and dirt-free.
The Migo Ascender is a robot vacuum and mop that comes with 6,000 PA suction power for sucking up all dirt, dust, and debris across your floors and carpets alike, as well as a mopping brush that can scrub your floors at a rate of 3,500 times per minute. It uses a transformers-based AI system that uses LIDAR scanners and vision sensors for environment sensing and reconstruction, enabling precise mapping, accurate obstacle avoidance, and intelligent route planning. Even better, it can do all those for multiple floors, so it can navigate every nook and cranny of your home all on its own.
Of course, what makes it special is that it doesn’t just identify stairways as an obstacle. Instead, it treats it as a regular part of the house that it can navigate, similar to the floors. When it encounters stairs, the robot deploys its legs, using it to vault the body up the next step before folding the legs back. From there, it will clean the step and move on the next one up, doing that until it reaches the next floor.
The Migo Ascender can cover a total area of 5,167 square feet across multiple floors, so a single one should be able to handle most homes. It runs relatively quiet, too, producing just 57 decibels, so it’s only a little louder than the quietest robovacs we’ve seen, allowing it to run without causing much disruption. Granted, this appears to be the outfit’s first product, so we’ll have to wait and see how well their cleaning robot actually performs compared to the latest models from Roomba, Roborock, and other outfits, but the stair-climbing feature really gives it an interesting edge.
There aren’t many details released so far, so we don’t know if it has any of the auto-cleaning capabilities we find in many modern robot vacuums. However, they do list a number of things on the official product page, including a companion app, where you can give commands, toggle carpet cleaning (you can set it to avoid carpets), set cleaning schedules, and define restricted zones.
The Migo Ascender is scheduled to ship in August. You can put down $5 to reserve a slot in the initial batch for a $400 discount. It will retail for $1,399.