I let this Nvidia GPU-powered robot vacuum clean my home for weeks

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• The Matic is available for purchase at $1,095.
• This robot vacuum has a unique form factor and roller brush, and a debris bag that eliminates the need for a huge dock.
• The Matic has its drawbacks, mainly that it’s too tall to clean under furniture and that it’s currently only available for iOS, with an Android beta app planned for July.

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Pioneer devices have the unique challenge of reinventing the wheel. They reimagine something that has become prevalent and referential to offer a new alternative to address common user problems. The Matic robot does precisely that for robot vacuums.

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Testing robot vacuums is always a fun experience, but many of them, excluding the Roborock Saros Z70, have gotten somewhat stagnant on their innovations. The Matic completely redefines the robot vacuum and does it so well that it outperforms many other, more expensive competitors.  

The Matic’s shape is the first thing that catches your eye. It’s shaped more like a robot than a robot vacuum, with a rectangular brush roller and mop housing at the front and an 8-inch tall body that contains the robot’s debris bag and water tank.

Its brush roller is housed in the rectangular part on the front instead of in the middle of a round robot to reach corners like a traditional or cordless vacuum. The mop roller is behind the brush but doesn’t touch the floor unless it’s time to mop. The Matic lowers the rollers to clean and tilts up the front to mop. 

This robot is intelligent enough to see stubborn messes and go over them accordingly. If you spill liquids, the robot will mop them up rather than vacuum over them, spreading them around. 

To do this, the Matic is equipped with five RGB cameras that continuously monitor its surroundings. Inside, an Nvidia GPU powers its AI capabilities, including 3D mapping, image recognition, and real-time decision-making.

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During testing, I tossed many obstacles on my floors and was rewarded with an efficient, intelligent robot vacuum unlike anything I’ve ever seen. For example, I put a plastic cup on the ground, and the Matic saw it immediately and avoided it. The cup was marked as an obstacle on the Matic app’s map within a few seconds. 

The Matic is so intelligent that it can make real-time decisions to adjust its cleaning settings and redirect the robot. I put cords of various colors and thicknesses on my floors, and the Matic never suctioned them up. The Matic recognizes the obstacles even if they appear after it begins cleaning, and it doesn’t hiccup to redirect itself like other robots do.

The Matic returns to charge sporadically during a cleaning session. On a day when my kids left a mess of art supplies in a room while the Matic was cleaning, I watched it return to charge and weave around various objects on the floor that hadn’t been there minutes prior, including the glue gun’s cord. It does it without even slowing down to assess its surroundings. 

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This robot always knows where it is in your home. It uses the cameras to create a 3D map, which was a bit unnerving to see for the first time. The robot scans your home with the cameras to create the map, letting you see your different floor types and even the patterns of your rugs on the virtual map in the app. 

I moved the Matic multiple times during testing to take photos, and the robot almost immediately updated its location on the app’s virtual map. Because it knows where it is, it can always find its dock when it’s done cleaning or recharging. And it can also make decisions according to its location, like taking another route to its dock when something temporarily blocks the shorter one. 

But a robot scanning your entire house like this begs the question of how secure it is. The Matic team is adamant that the data processing is all done locally on the robot, not on the cloud. The company tells me it doesn’t collect video or audio data, unless you authorize it in specific instances.

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The Matic app lets you choose whether you want to be able to control your robot remotely. If you do, the robot transmits data through an encrypted cloud connection. You can always opt out of remote usage if you’d prefer.

Even the Matic’s dustbin is completely reimagined. Instead of a hard plastic dustbin, this robot has a soft, clear bag that holds all the waste — even the dirty water. The bag has diaper salts to absorb liquids and a built-in HEPA filter so that you get a fresh one each time you get a new bag. Each bag lasts about a week, though your mileage may vary, and costs around $2. 

But never having to throw out a robot vacuum’s dirty water tank after it’s seemingly curdled at the dock is priceless.

The makers of Matic created the robot to focus more on efficiency and longevity than on having the strongest suction on the market. As a result, the robot is efficient and follows a unique checkerboard cleaning pattern to cover areas, followed by edge cleaning. 

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This is the fastest-moving robot vacuum I’ve tested, but it’s meant to be more of a household companion that can clean and maintain your floors. It navigates quickly, but it takes its time to clean, often five times as long as other robot vacuums. An area of my home that takes other robots about 90 minutes to vacuum and mop takes Matic about five hours. But it’s quiet enough to run at night, so I just run it overnight to wake up to a clean home. 

ZDNET’s buying advice

The Matic’s future is perhaps its most outstanding feature. It is a household robot that can vacuum and mop, equipped with an Nvidia GPU to power its computational capabilities. The Matic team continuously improves its software, adding features like edge cleaning, the new Android app, and future promises like voice and gesture control.

You won’t have to worry about buying the latest and greatest robot vacuum each year; you can just trust the Matic to continue improving and gaining new capabilities. 

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The first devices to revolutionize the status quo can be either hits, like Apple’s touchscreen iPhone, or misses, like Microsoft’s failed early 2000s attempt at a tablet. Most misses tend to fail because the public isn’t ready, not necessarily the manufacturer’s doing. As a robot vacuum, Matic proved to be a hit.