Robot vacuum makers have been hard at work engineering new innovative features these past few years, especially after Roborock released the S7 MaxV Ultra, one of the first fully autonomous robot vacuum and mop combos. Several brands have since been doubling down on catching up with flagships of their own, including Dreametech with the L10s Ultra, the brand’s first fully autonomous robot that autonomously self-washes after each cleaning cycle.

Not content with simply matching the competition, Dreametech has looked at ways to improve the overall cleaning experience and came up with unique features on the new Dreamebot L20 Ultra. These include the ability to extend the mop pads to the side, reaching baseboards and edges, as well as an automatic mop removal technology that allows it to eject them and keep them in the base station. Dreametech has also perfected the robot’s AI features, allowing it to detect dirt and automatically adapt its cleaning strategy. Let’s see how these improve the cleaning quality and results.

DreameBot L20 Ultra

The Dreamebot L20 Ultra is the robot vacuum and mop of your dream(e)s. It’s almost entirely automated, even able to extend or remove its mop pads by itself to better clean rugs and carpets, seamlessly switching between suction and mopping modes on the go. At $1,500 it’s certainly not cheap, but this might be a premium worth paying.

Dimensions

13 x 13 x 4 in (robot) 23.8 x 16.7 x 19.6 inch (base)

Dustbin Capacity

350mL

Battery Life

180mins in combo mode / 260 in vacuum or mop only

Brand

Dreametech

Price

$1,500

Weight

9.5 lbs

Surface Recommendation

All

Connectivity

WiFi

Integrations

Alexa, Google Assistant

Mopping Area Based on Water Tank Capacity（m²）

6,000 sq ft

Dust Bag Capacity（L）

3.2L

Cleaning Modes

Vacuum / Mop / Combo

Battery

6,400mAh

Suction Power

7,000Pa

Mop

2 rotating pressurized pads

Brushes

Single bristleless brush

Pros

• Design
• Oversized water tanks and dust bag
• Very autonomous (requires minimal human intervention)
• MopExtend feature

Cons

• Ackward navigation and obstacle detection
• Disappointing mopping results
• Cleaning time
• Price

Price and availability

The Dreamebot L20 Ultra is available on Amazon and on Dreametech’s website for $1,500. It’s only available in black in North America, while the white model is exclusive to Europe.

Design, hardware, what’s in the box

With the L20 Ultra, Dreametech has taken a different approach to designing its base station. Unlike the L10s Ultra, this one is much bulkier, looking similar in size to the Ecovacs Deebot T20 Omni’s, measuring a whopping 23.8 x 16.7 x 19.6 inches. Fortunately, it looks relatively appealing, thanks to its sleek design that makes it look discreet.

The front of the station is adorned with vertically etched stripes carved into the body, lending it a premium appearance. This upscale look is accentuated with a golden Dreame logo, positioned in the bottom right corner. Underneath it, a gold accent line separates it from the removable panel below. The latter discreetly covers the extra large 3.2L dust bag and includes a dedicated compartment for a replacement one. A drawer or a drop-down panel would have been more premium and easier to use, though, as this one fully detaches from the robot, often ending up on the floor.

The top flap hides the two oversized water tanks, which can contain up to 4L for the dirty one and 4.5L for the clean water one. In between them, a plastic cover conceals the detergent cartridge receptacle and a cavity to lodge the cleaning brush. There are also three quick access buttons that let you dock the robot, start or pause a cleaning cycle, or end the mop drying.

The bottom part of the base station serves to dock the robot, empty its dust bin, and wash and dry its mops. Similar to the competition, the L20 Ultra uses a plastic washing board with bristles that scrub the mop pads, unlike Roborock’s exclusive technology that prefers a dedicated brush to wash the mop. What’s new here, though, is the addition of magnets that allow the robot to eject its mop pads for them to remain in the base station during a vacuum-only cycle.

The robot itself looks like any other robovac, measuring 13 x 13 x 4 inches, and boasting a LiDAR dome on top. Despite its generic appearance, Dreametech has strived to make it look upscale, especially with its matte black color, as well as the golden accent line around the dome.

The top part of the bot is minimalistic, with only three quick access buttons, and a panel that’s fully removable. This one-piece design looks better, but it also means the cover fully detaches from the robot and needs to be placed somewhere else when it’s removed. Thankfully, there’s not much to find underneath it, besides the dust bin that empties into the base automatically, meaning the only reason you’d have to access it is to replace the HEPA filter.

The bumping board at the front of the robot also mimics the base station striped design, confirming the designers have done a great job, adding premium touches throughout the product.

At the front of the robot, the AI camera is surrounded by two LED stripes, as well as other sensors. Additional ones are also located around its body. At the back, Dreametech has nicely incorporated the charging pins and the small water port, used to refill the robot’s tank with clean water.

Underneath the bot, there’s a single liftable bristleless rubber brush, a single side brush, two large mop pads, and the usual wheels and sensors.

In addition to their polished design, both the robot and the base station feel sturdy and feature excellent build quality. There’s little doubt about their durability, and even the water tanks feel solid enough to last over time.

As for the box’s content, it mainly includes the robot and the base station, along with a cleaning brush, a spare dust bag, mop pads, and floor cleaner. No spare brushes or mop pads included, despite the high price point.

Setup, software, and features

Dreametech has one of the most intuitive apps when it comes to robovacs, thanks to its polished interface and ease of use. With the L20 Ultra, things are a bit more convoluted, given the multitude of options. Thankfully, most of the process is guided, and the built-in AI features can often decide on your behalf.

During the installation process, the robot will happily roam around your house to map it and automatically identify each room. The built-in camera can even identify furniture and help the robot assess what type of room it is, allowing it to automatically tag your bathroom, bedroom, living room, etc. I’ve found the map to be less accurate than what Roborock can do, even without a camera, as I’ve had to manually recreate some layout details, despite the fact that there is a door separating the rooms.

Once the map is generated, you can edit it, merge and separate rooms, create virtual walls, no-go and no-mop zones, and even transport paths. You can even generate a 3D map of your house and place furniture and edit the floor types. It’s not necessarily useful, but it’s fun to play with. In addition to offering one of the most customizable maps on the market, the Dreamebot L20 Ultra can handle up to four different maps, which is useful if you have a multi-story house.

The app lets you pick from plenty of different cleaning settings, including two CleanGenius AI-driven modes: Daily and Ultimate. These automatically adjust the cleaning settings, including the suction force and mopping speed and dampness. You can also finely control these settings, adjusting the suction, mopping speed, humidity, and more manually.

You can even use different settings for each room, such as less thorough cleaning power in the bedrooms compared to the living areas. Similarly, you can adjust the cleaning sequence and define the order in which the rooms are cleaned. Finally, in addition to just mopping or vacuuming, the L20 Ultra can do both at the same time, or even one after the other, for perfect cleaning results.

There are even more advanced settings to pick from, including cleaning in the floor direction to align the cleaning patterns with the grain of the floor, as well as adding cleaning solution, washing the mops a second time if they’re not clean enough, and even how often to extend the mop pads to clean along the baseboards and edges or whether to do it automatically. When dealing with carpets, the L20 lets you pick whether to raise its mops to 0.4 inches above the floor, or detach them to avoid getting thick carpets wet.

As mentioned above, the L20 Ultra comes with built-in AI, which uses the onboard camera to identify dirt and help it with its navigation. This also means you can use it to monitor your house in real time, both when cleaning or even when the robot is idle. Thanks to two-way audio, you can scold your pet in real time, and even have the bot patrol around your house to check for unusual activity. The video is fully encrypted, thanks to strong end-to-end encryption algorithms, and requires a passcode to view, and the bot indicates when video monitoring is active, either vocally or visually, according to your preferences.

Lastly, in addition to controlling the robot using the app, you can also use the buttons on the dock or the robovac to start a cycle. More conveniently, the L20 Ultra is compatible with both Google Assistant or Alexa, allowing you to use your favorite voice assistant to start the robot. Unfortunately, though, only Google Assistant is compatible with complex commands, such as sending the robot to clean a specific room.

Cleaning efficiency and battery life

With the L20 Ultra, Dreametech hasn’t just slapped new AI features and improved mop pads onto the L10s Ultra. Instead, it’s also improved the key cleaning components, including the vacuuming technology, which now comes with an impressive 7,000Pa suction power and a raising rubber bristleless brush, which works in conjunction with the side brush. On hard surfaces, the vacuuming results are excellent, and its size allows it to slide seamlessly under most furniture, ensuring proper vacuuming across your home.

When it comes to carpet cleaning, the robot does a great job, thanks to its high suction power. A dual-brush roller like the ones on most Roombas or the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra would have enabled it to thoroughly clean debris and dust from thick rugs, but alas.

When it comes to mopping, the cleaning results are relatively good, thanks to the dual mop pads and pressurized scrubbing. The mops are washed before and after a cleaning cycle, while the robot’s built-in water tank is automatically refilled with clean water and cleaning solution, which ensures the mop pads are damp throughout the cycle. As mentioned before, the L20 Ultra is the first robot with extendable mop pads, allowing it to reach baseboards and edges while mopping. Depending on your preferences, this can be done automatically, once a week, or every time.

While this sounds particularly clever on paper, the results aren’t that convincing, especially because a strip is left uncleaned the first time the robot passes, requiring an extra pass. Also, in terms of mopping results, the L20 Ultra is a bit disappointing compared to other models, as it struggles with hard stains, even with detergent use.

This being said, the built-in AI features and camera help it detect when the floor is particularly dirty, automatically prompting it to clean for a second time. When doing that, the L20 Ultra ends up cleaning the entire rooms where it detected dirt for a second time. In my case, this meant the entire house but the bedrooms were vacuumed and mopped twice. In terms of cleaning effect, the results are generally good, except for particularly hard stains. However, it also means the robot takes its sweet time to clean, as it took 165 minutes to clean 570 sq ft, out of which 475 were cleaned a second time. This also means the robot needs a lot of water, but its oversized tanks help balance that out.

Similarly, while its camera helps it detect obstacles more precisely, the robot tends to avoid them with too much caution, leaving about an inch that’s not cleaned around it. Worse, if you happen to remove an object during a cleaning cycle, the robot will behave as if it were still here, cautiously avoiding an imaginary obstacle. It’s thought my feet or dog were obstacles, and kept trying to avoid them, even though we’d both left for a walk.

When it comes to navigation, the robot does a great job of avoiding obstacles, including cables, and not getting stuck. It sometimes struggles to navigate to places and takes awkward directions, but ends up finding its way nonetheless. It generally tends to avoid narrow spots, even if it could have passed through them, preferring caution over cleaning everywhere. We’ve also noticed it sometimes passes at the same spot several times, without it being an issue. In any case, these navigational glitches are easy to fix with a software update, and we hope Dreametech will continue to improve its robot over time.

As for the noise level, the robot is relatively quiet, which helps you continue to have a conversation or watch TV while it’s working. Only the top suction power is a bit noisier, but still acceptable if you’re working next to it.

Finally, the 6,400mAh battery should last for up to 180 minutes when vacuuming and mopping simultaneously, or 260 minutes while just vacuuming or mopping in quiet mode. It’s significantly bigger than most competing models, which typically come with 5,200mAh batteries. The L20 Ultra also features fast charging, allowing it to resume work quickly should it run out of battery.

Maintenance and care

With the L20 Ultra, Dreametech has included a particularly large base station, unlike its former models. This allows it to house extra-large water tanks and dust bag, requiring very little human intervention day-to-day. The manufacturer claims the robot can clean over 6,000 square feet autonomously on the most economical settings. In our more water-intensive usage, we’ve noticed that the robot cleaned about 2,000 square feet of dirty floors before we needed to refill the clean water tank, making it a very autonomous product.

In terms of care, the mop pads are washed before and after each cycle with the bristled washing board in the base station. They’re also dried with hot air after each wash, helping avoid odors and mildew. Unfortunately, this method isn’t as effective as a dedicated brush to clean the mop pads, which means they tend to smell over time and start getting dirty, meaning you’ll still have to throw them in the washer occasionally.

The washing board itself can be cleaned by pressing and holding a button on the base station, which fills it with water. All you need to do is scrub it with the brush that came in the box, and press the button again to flush it out. You can also remove it entirely and clean it in the sink if you prefer.

As for the robot, its bristleless brush means little hair gets wrapped around it, so you only need to clean its sensors and brush about once a month to ensure they’re clear of debris and dirt.

Competition

The L20 Ultra is Dreametech’s latest flagship, which comes with innovative features that are unique on the market, costing a whopping $1,500. However, the competition also has great products that come with different functionality, which could be more appealing for some:

The new Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni, which costs $100 less, features a smaller, more discreet base, with similar AI features and hot water washing technology, enabling it to remove stains more efficiently. It also comes in a square design, allowing it to clean along edges more easily for better cleaning results overall. However, it’s not much better at finding its way around the house, compared to the L20 Ultra, and it’s much worse at detecting and avoiding obstacles.

As for the Roborock’s S8 Pro Ultra, it costs an extra $100 compared to the L20 Ultra, and features a vibrating sonic mop and dual rubber brush rollers, giving it a better cleaning performance than the Dreamebot L20 Ultra overall. Although it doesn’t have an RGB camera, it uses 3D infrared light and laser to detect and identify obstacles, while also protecting your privacy.

Should you buy it?

The Dreamebot L20 Ultra is a good robot vacuum, but not quite one of the best. It offers plenty of innovation, seemingly giving it an advantage over the competition, both in terms of dirt detection, but also lifting and detaching its mop pads, as well as the ability to extend them. It is also equipped with large-capacity tanks and an extra large dust bag, giving it extraordinary autonomy, meaning it requires little human intervention.

And in practice, it performs rather well. However, its AI features are not yet fully developed. Indeed, not only does it struggle with navigation, it also has difficulty knowing what to do in the presence of obstacles. Its wet mopping is also disappointing compared to high-end models from Roborock and Ecovacs, despite featuring an integrated cleaning solution. Finally, its cleaning time is often too long, since a second pass is often necessary and automatically triggered when the floors are dirty.

It’s a shame for a product at this price point, especially knowing that the competition performs better in wet cleaning. However, if your home is well-organized and you don’t have pets or your floors don’t get too dirty, it will perfectly suit your needs. On the other hand, if your floors tend to get dirty quickly and you rely on your robot for thorough cleaning, you should consider a model like the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra or the Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni.

DreameBot L20 Ultra

The Dreamebot L20 Ultra is the robot vacuum and mop of your dream(e)s. It’s almost entirely automated, even able to extend or remove its mop pads by itself to better clean rugs and carpets, seamlessly switching between suction and mopping modes on the go. At $1,500 it’s certainly not cheap, but this might be a premium worth paying.

Dimensions

13 x 13 x 4 in (robot) 23.8 x 16.7 x 19.6 inch (base)

Dustbin Capacity

350mL

Battery Life

180mins in combo mode / 260 in vacuum or mop only

Brand

Dreametech

Price

$1,500

Weight

9.5 lbs

Surface Recommendation

All

Connectivity

WiFi

Integrations

Alexa, Google Assistant

Mopping Area Based on Water Tank Capacity（m²）

6,000 sq ft

Dust Bag Capacity（L）

3.2L

Cleaning Modes

Vacuum / Mop / Combo

Battery

6,400mAh

Suction Power

7,000Pa

Mop

2 rotating pressurized pads

Brushes

Single bristleless brush