Cliff sensor confused by outlines on area rug

Hi all - have an area rug that has square shapes on it and a black border of maybe 3 inches. This causes the robot vacuum to lose its mind unfortunately. See this video for the behavior.

In talking with support, this appears to be a known issue with dark floors and the cliff sensor, and they are thinking about a workaround. That’s lovely but leaves me in a really tough spot, as this area rug essentially blocks off a whole room and robot either gets stuck or doesn’t clean a large portion of my downstairs!

What I’d love to see is an update where you can ideally adjust the cliff sensor sensitivity, or lacking that disable it completely. I know that wouldn’t be popular with the engineers, but in many cases like mine, is perfectly acceptable as there are no stairs on that floor to fall over, and even if there were stairs that is easily avoided after an initial mapping by making a no-go zone there… or perhaps introduce the opposite of a no-go zone called a safe zone where cliff sensors deactivate! that would be even better!!!

Love the vacuum and all my Wyze products, but find this very frustrating – bought it to clean the floors and it’s “safety” feature is preventing that from happening!

1 Like

For others in support of a “safe zone” feature, please see this wishlist entry!

1 Like

and in meantime, guess only solution is to hack away at the sensors as described here or in the wishlist post.

2 Likes

Just as a final update to anyone else new to Wyze Robot Vac and running into this issue… I did go the route of carefully taping some white laminated paper over the four sensors - and viola! My issues of false edge / cliff detection on my carpet are gone. Trouble (our nickname for the vacuum) after this fix had NO TROUBLE in cleaning the whole downstairs!

I’ll also note that this Wyze article also seems to validate this is the only workaround for this issue at the moment.

Any workaround to disable the cliff sensors?

At present, there is no immediate solution to disable the cliff sensors as they are essential in many homes. It also involves complex underlying navigation algorithms and requires a lot of effort to make changes. A workaround is to tape over the 4 cliff sensors with white/light-colored paper to manually disable them if you have to. Please DO NOT use this workaround if there are any stairs/cliffs in your home.

I do wish my tech support agent had mentioned this as a workaround - would have saved me some time and anguish before I discovered this in these forums!

I hope this post helps someone else in the meantime, and keeping fingers crossed for a proper “safe zone” fix from Wzye engineering - would make their product stand out in the marketplace for sure!

2 Likes

Welcome to the forum @nut4golf!

Good information, thank you.

I would say enterprise resourced support associates don’t generally provide “hacks” or workarounds as a solution, but you found your way to the place that is a trove of information!

1 Like

My congratulations to @nut4golf for doing a fine job of research on their own. Only very rarely does a new forum poster avail themselves of the information on the forum and come to valid and helpful conclusions all by themselves.

Well done, and thanks for sharing your findings, results, and recommendations.

1 Like

I placed white paper over the four sensors and the vacuum would not run.