Dual-Motor DirectSuction™ and VortexMatrix™: The Engineering Story Behind xLean TR1's Cleaning Power

Foreword

When people evaluate a floor cleaning device, cleaning performance is what they care about most. It's the one capability that determines whether the product actually does its job—or just looks like it does.
The xLean TR1 is the world's first dual-form floor washing robot. Its cleaning system isn't an upgraded version of existing robot vacuum technology. It's a completely different approach—built from the ground up based on how wet & dry vacuums actually work, then engineered to fit inside a robot. The result is what we call Dual-Motor DirectSuction™.
This article explains how the technology works and why we built it the way we did.

The Robot Form: Autonomous Daily Cleaning

The Handheld Form: On-the-Spot Cleaning

Why Traditional Robot Vacuums
Have a Cleaning Problem

Before getting into the technical details, let's address a fundamental question: why can't robot vacuums match the cleaning power of wet & dry vacuums?

• How Existing Robot Vacuums Actually Work—and Where They Fall Short

Mop pad systems (used by most products)

These rely on a mop pad to pick up dirt by smearing it across the floor. During cleaning, the mop pad carries dirty water into the next section, causing secondary contamination. The core issue is that there's no real-time self-cleaning mechanism—the dirt doesn't disappear after the mop passes over it, it just gets spread around.

Track and roller systems

These use tracks or rollers to pick up dirt, then a squeegee scrapes it off. Better than mop pads, but the adhesion capacity is limited. When faced with large liquid spills or sticky residue, there's still leftover soil. Both approaches share the same structural limitation: the main brush handles dry debris and the mop handles spills, but they work separately. When there's a lot of wet mess—or a mix of wet and dry—the main brush inevitably sucks in liquid, which leads to a damp dust bin, liquid pooling in the base station, and eventually mold.

• What Wet & Dry Vacuums Do Differently

Wet & dry vacuums work on a completely different principle:

Continuous clean water rinse

The roller wipes the floor, then rotates to a squeegee that scrapes off the dirt and sprays clean water on the roller at the same time. The roller always touches the floor with a clean surface.

Strong suction

The suction motor creates negative pressure in the dirty water tank, pulling dirt directly from the floor and roller gaps into the tank—no need for the roller to hold large amounts of soil.

The key insight is that wet & dry vacuums work by sucking dirt away, not by smearing it. The problem is that traditional wet & dry vacuums are bulky. Their water-air separation systems work well but take up a lot of space. Shrinking that system down to fit inside a robot is an engineering challenge that nobody had solved—until now.

Dual-Motor DirectSuction™
A New Approach to Robot Cleaning Power

Dual-Motor DirectSuction™ is essentially a wet& dry vacuum's cleaning logic, redesigned and compressed to fit inside a robot.

• What Does "Dual-Motor DirectSuction™" Mean?

"Dual-Motor" refers to the front and rear rollers, both capable of self-cleaning in real time. "DirectSuction" means the robot uses a suction motor to generate 17,000 Pa of negative pressure in the dirty water tank, pulling dirt directly from where the roller touches the floor into the tank—rather than relying on the roller to pick up and hold soil. The core idea: use suction power instead of physical adhesion.

• How the Dual Rollers Work

The xLean TR1 has a roller at the front and rear. The front roller does the main cleaning; the rear roller handles what the front one misses and helps reduce water streaks.

Debris hits the front roller first. The roller spins at up to 400 RPM, with bristles that strip dirt off the floor.
Most debris gets pushed to a collection point. A small amount clings to the roller.
The suction motor creates negative pressure in the dirty water tank, and the airflow channel pulls the collected debris straight into the tank.
The residue on the roller gets carried to a metal squeegee as the roller spins, scraped off, and suctioned into the tank.
A 16-hole nozzle sprays clean water across the roller to rinse it off.
The roller is now clean and continues rotating with a fresh surface against the floor.
A rubber squeegee follows behind to reduce water marks on the floor.

• What the xLean TR1 Can Actually Clean

Because of Dual-Motor DirectSuction™, the xLean TR1 handles types of mess that regular robot vacuums can't:

Type of Mess	How It's Handled
Dust and small particles	17,000 Pa suction pulls them in directly; handles particles under 1cm
Liquids (coffee, soda, etc.)	Most liquid gets suctioned straight into the tank; the rest is handled by the self-cleaning roller
Mixed and sticky messes  (ketchup, milk-soaked cereal)	Roller self-cleaning plus strong suction work together
Hair	We have a comb-like design that guides hair straight into the suction path—no tangling

VortexMatrix™ Separation
Three Years to Solve the Miniaturization Problem

The hardest engineering challenge in Dual-Motor DirectSuction™ was taking the water-air separation system—a large, mature component in wet & dry vacuums—and making it small enough to fit inside a robot.

• Why Water-Air Separation Is a Big Deal

In a wet & dry vacuum, the suction motor creates suction that pulls in both air and dirt. The dirt stays in the water tank, but the air has to go somewhere—typically back out through the suction motor. The water-air separation system is what keeps dirt out of the suction motor. In a big wet & dry vacuum, this system has plenty of room to work well. Making it small enough for a robot, while keeping it just as effective, is genuinely hard.
The xLean team spent three years and 34 iterations to solve this. The result is VortexMatrix™ Separation Technology.

• How VortexMatrix™ Works

The core of VortexMatrix™ is a multi-stage cyclone structure. When the dirt-air mixture enters, spinning centrifugal force throws solid and liquid particles against the outer wall, while clean air exits through the center and continues to the suction motor. The dirt falls into the tank under its own weight.
This achieves two things:

1. Clean separation: Dirt and air split apart in the tank, so the suction motor stays protected.

2. Compact size: The multi-stage design gets the same separation performance as large wet & dry vacuums, but in a fraction of the space.

• Why Miniaturization Is Hard

Getting water-air separation to work at robot scale involves three big challenges:

Space is extremely tight

The robot needs to fit a clean water tank, dirty water tank, battery, wheels, suction motor, rollers, and more—all competing for the same limited interior volume.

You can't sacrifice performance

The robot needs to fit a clean water tank, dirty water tank, battery, wheels, suction motor, rollers, and more—all competing for the same limited interior volume.

It has to be reliable

Robots run in real homes, with vibrations, humidity changes, and daily use. The system has to hold up over time.

After 34 rounds of iteration, the xLean team solved issues with sealing, airflow, and separation efficiency. The result is a complete water-air separation system in a footprint that fits inside a consumer robot vacuum.

How Cleaning Power
Fits Into the Whole Product

Dual-Motor DirectSuction™ doesn't stand alone—it works together with the rest of xLean TR1's capabilities.

• Synergy with EvoMind™'s Spatio-Temporal Variable Cleaning

The EvoMind™ algorithm adjusts cleaning strategy in real time based data from the dirt sensor and the camera. Light mess gets a quick pass; heavy dirt gets a slower, more thorough one. Having 17,000 Pa of suction power means the robot can slow down and apply more effort on stubborn stains without losing cleaning effectiveness. It's the difference between mopping slowly with pressure versus wiping fast with no pressure.

• Synergy with the OMNI Station

The base station runs a 75°C hot water self-cleaning cycle that rinses the rollers, dirty water tank, and airflow channels. After the robot self-cleans, everything is ready for the next run—rollers, tank, and channels are all clean. No user intervention needed. The station also supports auto water refill and drain, so the robot is always ready for the next cleaning session.

• Synergy with the Dual-Form Design

The dual-form design is what makes xLean TR1 different from any other robot vacuum. And Dual-Motor DirectSuction™ is what makes dual-form actually make sense. Without powerful cleaning, the handheld form is just a gimmick. But with it, the dual-form delivers real value.

In Robot form, the robot handles daily floor maintenance automatically. In Handheld form, the same cleaning power goes directly to the user—who can handle sudden messes the way they would with a real wet & dry vacuum. Kitchen spills, dropped food, bathroom puddles—these are situations where a robot vacuum can't help, but xLean TR1 can.

There's another layer here: every time someone uses the handheld form, that cleaning data gets fed back into the EvoMind™ algorithm. The robot learns from how users clean manually—push patterns, stubborn spots, pressure points—and gets smarter over time. The dual-form isn't just two shapes; it's a continuous learning loop between user and machine.

A Note on Carpet Cleaning

One important thing to know: the xLean TR1 does not clean carpet. This is a deliberate choice.
Here's why. Traditional robot mop-vacuum hybrids have persistent problems on carpet:

• Drive wheels grind dirt into the carpet

When the robot drives over carpet, whatever is on the drive wheels gets pressed into the carpet fibers—making it dirtier with every pass.

• Hard squeegees damage carpet texture

When the robot turns at carpet edges, the squeegee can catch and pull the carpet surface. Over time this causes pilling or actual damage.

• Roller moisture ruins carpet

The mop leaves water on the carpet, which dries into visible stains.
These problems don't have easy fixes without adding new hardware trade-offs. We also think that quality carpets in your house are better left to purpose-built tools for now. Rather than ship a half-baked feature and call it done, we made the deliberate call not to offer carpet cleaning—and we're actively exploring whether there's a solution worth building.

Summary

The xLean TR1's cleaning power comes from rethinking how a wet & dry vacuum works, not from tweaking how robot vacuums work.

Dual-Motor DirectSuction™—real-time self-cleaning rollers plus 17,000 Pa of direct suction—delivers a level of cleaning power that traditional robot vacuums simply cannot reach. VortexMatrix™ Separation Technology solves the miniaturization challenge that kept this class of cleaning power locked inside large, bulky wet & dry vacuums

Together, these two technologies let the xLean TR1 deliver genuine wet & dry vacuum level cleaning in a robot form factor—fully automatic when you want it, and directly in your hands when you need it.

Meet the Next-Gen Cleaning Robot

The World's First Dual-form Transformable Floor Washing Robot with Human Cleaning Intent.

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