The Worlds FIRST Robot Vacuum WAS AMAZING - The Electrolux Trilobite

the world's first robot vacuum was in many ways also one of the best ever built we at vacuum wars recently bought one off eBay to test and the results were extremely interesting the Electrolux trilobite was first seen in 1996 when a prototype was demonstrated on a BBC show called tomorrow's world though it would be another five years in 2001 that Electrolux released their first commercially available unit the za1 beating iRobot by a year which is why the Electrolux trilobite will forever hold the title of first commercially available robot vacuum Electrolux which is one of the oldest traditional vacuum companies in the world also should probably get the credit for pioneering many of the technologies we associate with robot vacuums today but one of the more interesting things they did was give the first robot vacuum the world had ever seen more power than any robot vacuum seen since then or at least that I know of among other things we at vacuum wars test airflow with robot vacuums and we typically see a range of about seven CFM on the low end to about 15 or 17 CFM on the high end with the most I've ever seen being about 24 CFM we tested the Electrolux trilobite at 43 CFM which is almost double the power of the most powerful robot vacuums of today and its stated 90 watt power showed up in several other tests it absolutely destroyed the crevice pickup test something that modern vacuums really struggle with unless they're particularly powerful or have a head specifically designed for it also on the deep-clean test where we embed 100 grams of sand onto medium pile carpet and weigh the dust bends before and after a 5 minute run and it scored 83 % which is in the top 5 for this test it also did extremely good with our standard debris pickup tests not only did it do really well with all the different debris sizes from fine to extra-large but it excelled with things that other robot vacuums struggle with unless they are pretty high-end things like picking up heavy debris like sand on hard floors another cool thing is while a lot of robot vacuums in the early days just used a bump sensor and a simple algorithm to navigate randomly and while the trilobite also navigates more or less randomly it uses some rather expensive sonar and our technology as well as a processor - more or less map a house and remember obstacles it had a heavy-duty metal brush roll something rarely seen today it had a massive dust bin which at 1,200 milliliters is the biggest dust bin on a robot vacuum I know of the final pro before we get to the negative stuff is that it returned to the base to recharge on its own which would become a standard feature later on but it was a pretty impressive thing to have right out of the gates obviously there is a reason that iRobot became the giant in the robot vacuum world that it is an Electrolux didn't so yeah the first thing was the price the version that I have which is technically the second generation which has a few extra features retailed at $1,800 well over a thousand dollars more than the Roomba and if it was available today it would still be the most expensive robot vacuum on the market there were some interesting articles at the time trying to justify the price and they had some good points but that was certainly a big part of the reason it didn't sell as much as the Roomba floor vac did another problem was the size and the battery life in order to make the Electrolux trilobite as powerful as it was it required a lot of juice and so it needed two massive batteries which combined only gave it a run time of 45 to 60 minutes which actually isn't that bad considering its power for comparison the 2002 Roomba floor vac could get between 60 and 90 minutes the main problem with the battery size was that it meant that the trilobite needed to be really big it was about 5.1 inches tall so it wasn't able to get under a lot of furniture like the Roomba could this actually brings up one of the things that I robot did that really changed the game they developed a dual brush system that didn't require a lot of airflow to be good at deep cleaning carpet the point is that that one innovation allowed iRobot to use a small battery since they didn't need much power which meant that the Roomba could be smaller and probably more importantly it could cost a lot less all of which certainly helped them become the household name that they are today there are a few other cons for example the trilobite didn't have an edge brush like pretty much all robot vacuums after the Roomba did so it was pretty poor with edge and corner cleaning also even though it had far more advanced and more expensive sensors than the Roomba floor vac in our navigation test the trilobite took longer and its coverage just wasn't as good as the Roomba so the bottom line is that I actually think Electrolux was lightyears ahead of its time with the trilobite but it seemed a bit over engineered and the resulting large price tag really costs them with the consumer and paved the way for the rise of iRobot but the people who worked on the Electrolux trilobites should be commended as they pretty much gave us the blueprint for the modern smart robot vacuum be sure to subscribe to vacuum ores to keep up with all the latest robot vacuum tech and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Vacuum Wars

Views: 184,673

Keywords: vacuum wars, first robot vacuum, ELectrolux robot vacuum, Robot vacuum history, History of robot vacuums, what was the first robot vacuum, Electrolux ZA1, Electrolux ZA2, electrolux robot vacuum review

Id: V9u0f6jVxw0

Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020