The Narwal Freo Z Ultra’s features blend cutting-edge smarts with old-school cleaning principles
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.
