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iRobot Roomba j7+ (7550) Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum – Uses PrecisionVision Navigation to Identify & Avoid Objects Like Socks, Shoes, & Pet Waste, Smart Mapping, Self-Empty for Up to 60 Days

Roomba does not have LIDAR navigation.  I do have another robot that is LIDAR so I can give a rough pros and cons of the two type of navigation system.Roomba relies more on bumping into things and it's map to navigate.  There's good and bad.  The bad is that it will often go around the house as if it's a drunk bumping into furniture and objects.  The robot needs to learn your floorplan and that can take a long time since it's bumping into everything.  It took me about 5 runs of my whole house.  Each run took about 3 -4 hours since my house is 2500 sq ft.  Prior to it learning my house, it's navigation looked like it was non existent.  I thought I had just bought the dumbest robot especially compared to my inexpensive $300 LIDAR robot.  However, once the robot declared that it had learned my floorplan everything changed and I began to see the benefits of the iRobot navigation system.Even after learning my floorplan, the iRobot still  takes forever navigating around table and chair legs.  Bumping and taking multiple attempts to escape the forest of chair legs, but surprisingly, it has never gotten stuck in my house.  I have set it to vacuum my entire house several times and in total it has vacuumed about 20,000 sq ft in it's lifetime so far and it has never gotten stuck.  We have kids so there's a lot of toys and miscellaneous items everywhere so that's amazing to me.My LIDAR robot on the other hand navigates beautifully around furniture but it can't see cords or other lower to the ground objects and it constantly gets stuck on these objects.  Also because LIDAR isn't bumping into things to navigate it gets stuck under my couch because the fabric under my couch sags and the LIDAR robot will travel underneath the couch but then think it's blocked in by the fabric when it tries to leave the couch area.  The iRobot doesn't have this problems because whenever it's in doubt it just goes barreling through and utilizes the bump sensor to feel around.The other problem with my $300 LIDAR unit was that it would sometimes do a cleaning run but mistakenly think that there is a new floorplan and erase the old one.  It's more sensitive to changes because it's LIDAR hardware can detect small changes.  This is probably more a software issue.  The iRobot on the other hand, is very hesitant to change it's map.  That is good in that it has never erased my current floorplan or made incorrect modifications, however, the initial "learning of the floorplan" is a bit harder if it doesn't discover all your rooms.  Getting it to discover new rooms is more difficult since the floor plan is locked in.  I've found the best way to get it to discover new rooms after it has "learned the floorplan" is to do an area clean and just draw a box where to new room should be.  Once I did that, it would explore that area and declare it found a new space and then it was added to the floorplan.A few other more minor issues is that the Roomba software is polished but also very limited on options as compared to my inexpensive LIDAR unit. For example, I can't set how often the Roomba should self empty or the quiet times (they removed the beta feature for quiet times).  These are important features since the self empty dock is very loud.  Much louder then my LIDAR robots self empty dock.  I'm not that sensitive to noise.  The noise level is just a design flaw.  I can't imagine going forward they will keep this design.  If you live in a small apartment then you should definitely be aware that you will be disturbing your neighbors or yourself when it self empties.  It's louder than my large shop vac.