I recently discovered the Quick Mapping option. This is a cool way to prompt the robot vacuum to map the configuration of rooms without doing a cleaning. It also is useful because the behavior seems to avoid bumping up against all the walls and getting into trouble. The end product is a map that can be edited and used for a cleaning.
The main advantage of Quick Mapping, as I see it, is that it establishes the configuration so that, prior to doing a cleaning, you can go in and add virtual walls where you don’t want to vacuum to go. This works, somewhat, because it just scans the room and doesn’t get into the dangerous areas that need to be walled off.
Unfortunately, it will not let you pause the quick mapping and set up a virtual wall, which sometimes I need to do. So there is this room with a thick carpet that the robot gets lost in, but I can’t quick map the room and block off the carpet before the problem occurs.
If the developers could add virtual walling while the quick map is in progress, that would be a nice fix!
The other thing I notice about Quick Mapping is that sometimes it quits before it has done all the rooms; this happens also with a regular cleaning-- but a regular cleaning map will expand later when it discovers new rooms, and it doesn’t seem that a quick map will expand (not sure, requires more experimentation.)