How to get a good first map

The map is the robot's model of your house, and everything it does afterwards is built on it. A map made in a dark room with the doors shut and a bag on the floor produces a robot that behaves oddly for months, and most people never connect the two.

Before the first run

1. Open every internal door, including cupboards and rooms you intend to exclude later. A room the robot never sees is a room it does not know exists, and adding it afterwards means remapping.
2. Do it in daylight. Essential on a camera-based robot, and it does no harm on a LiDAR one. The obstacle-recognition hardware is usually camera-based even when the mapping is not.
3. Tidy the floor properly. Anything left out becomes a wall in the first map on some systems, and a phantom obstacle the robot routes around for weeks.
4. Cover full-length mirrors and glass panels at robot height. This is the single biggest cause of a map with a room that does not exist — the laser passes into the reflection and the robot maps the reflected space.
5. Move the dock to its permanent home first. The dock is the map's origin on most systems. Moving it later can invalidate the whole map.
6. Let it run a mapping-only pass if the model offers one. It is faster than a cleaning run and produces a better result because the robot is not also managing dirt.

After the map is built

• Name the rooms properly, straight away. Voice control and per-room schedules are far more useful than they sound, and neither works with rooms called Room 3 and Room 4.
• Split and merge rooms where the robot got it wrong. An open-plan space it split down the middle will otherwise produce odd cleaning patterns forever.
• Set the no-go zones that matter most: rug fringes (here is why), the cable nest behind the television, pet bowls and litter trays, and any floor that should not be mopped.
• Set mop-only exclusions separately from full no-go zones. Most people do not know these are different, and it is the setting that lets a robot vacuum a rug it must never mop.
• Save the map, and check the app has more than one map slot if you have more than one floor.

When to remap from scratch

Remapping wipes your zones and room names, so it is a last step rather than a first. It is genuinely warranted after you have moved furniture substantially, after you have changed flooring, if the dock has moved permanently, or if the map has accumulated phantom obstacles from months of clutter. It is not warranted for a single odd run.

If the map keeps breaking

A map that will not hold usually means the robot cannot localize reliably — dim rooms on a camera-based model, deep carpet causing wheel slip and odometry drift, or reflective surfaces confusing a laser. Fix the cause rather than remapping repeatedly. The general diagnostic pass is on the troubleshooting hub.