The Narwal Freo Z Ultra is a new robot vacuum that has been unveiled at IFA 2024. It’s “designed to tackle complex home messes”, and to do so, Narwal has packed in a whole load of AI features… and added a little fluffy tail.
I’ll start with the techy bits. The Freo Z Ultra uses AI to avoid obstacles, adapt its cleaning process to the type and amount of dirt there is on the floor, and to choose which temperature to mop at. All that intelligence requires some serious processing power, and Narwal says it’s equivalent to an Xbox in that respect. It comes with two separate CPUs – a main one and another dedicated just to AI.
Today’s best robot vacuums are increasingly clever, but the Freo Z Ultra has some features we’ve never seen before. For example, it’s the first robovac on the market to feature two RGB cameras, rather than your standard ‘one camera and a light’ setup, enabling it to capture an 136-degree view at 1,600 x 1,200 resolution. That combines with dual AI chips to offer superior object identification (and avoidance, if necessary).
Alongside those cutting-edge smarts is a more old-school addition: a baseboard cleaning tool, which is essentially a little fluffy tail that clips on to the side of the robovac and gently dusts your baseboards when it gets close to the edge of the room. It’s an optional extra rather than being included as standard. I saw a demo and it’s a super-simple but clever little innovation that adds an extra level of cleaning power. It also looks really cute.
Better identification
Back to the techy bit. Lots of high-end robovacs are designed to recognize common objects, but the Narwal’s object-identification list is far longer than most, taking in over 120 common objects, from furniture legs to toys and even plastic bags.
That means it can apply human-like cleaning decisions in response, delivering a more complete clean because it’s not giving everything a wide berth by default. So if it identifies a chair leg, it knows to get as close to it as possible. In contrast, if the mess is a pet poop, it will navigate around it and absolutely not try to get as close as possible. For things like tissues and cables, it knows to retract the roller brush so it doesn’t end up in a tangle.
Better obstacle avoidance means you shouldn’t have to tidy up before launching your robovac (good news, because the benefits of remote control are somewhat negated when your robovac ends up tangled in a rogue charging cable and in need of manual rescue 10 minutes into its cleaning routine). For the times when you do want to use it when you’re home, it’s designed to be even better at operating around people and pets, again thanks to AI.
There’s even a mode you can use where the robot will see a pet in one area of your home, and delay cleaning that area until the pet has moved on. It’ll then deep-clean that area to get rid of any extra hair or general messes your pet might have made on its travels.
Clean bandit
There are more human-like features in the Freo Z Ultra’s approach to cleaning. For example, it knows if the mess is dry or wet, and chooses the best cleaning approach in response. For dry cleanup jobs, it can unleash up to 12,000 PA of suction (about the highest we’ve seen on any robovac).
In line with its aquatic name, Narwal has put more effort than most into the mopping side of things. Its rotating mops will applying downward pressure – up to ‘an industry leading 12N’ of it – to scrub off dirt. It’ll also approach different floor types in different ways, so it’ll add more water and apply more pressure when cleaning a ceramic tiled floor compared to a wooden one.
If your hard floor is super dirty, it’ll sense that, and extend mopping times in response. If that spillage is a heavy, dirty liquid, it’ll just mop it and return to the dock to clean the mop pads afterwards. Alternatively, if it’s clean enough to just need a light mop, it’ll use less water too.
Mopping temperature adjusts automatically between 45C and 75C, depending on the type of mess. So cooler water for dusty messes, hotter for greasy spillages. After cleaning, the temperature will rise to the maximum 75C anyway, to kill off bacteria (a process that Narwal refers to, accurately but unsettlingly, as ‘pasteurization’).
The smarter your home appliances get, the more security concerns start to seem like a real threat. To try and put people’s minds at ease, Narwal’s storage and computation chip operates entirely offline, with all information being stored within the robot itself (main CPU computation does use an internet connection, but is handled separately).
The Narwal Freo Z Ultra is available to buy in the US for a list price of $1,499.99 (current early bird price $1,099.99) and Australia for AU$2,499 (current early bird price AU$2,099).
