7/10
Open rating explainerInformationWIREDAI vision helps to power excellent cleaning. Charging stand makes topping up the battery easy. Lightweight.TIREDShort battery life. Only spends 10 minutes at the waterline after each run before sinking. AI scheduling mode didn’t work properly. Cleanup can be a bit of a bear.Aiper’s latest robotic pool cleaner extends the Scuba line with—what else?—AI features. Like the iGarden M1 Pro Max 100 and Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra, the Aiper Scuba V3 is outfitted with cameras that let it see underwater. Why is that important? Because those lenses let it spot debris while it’s trundling along, allowing the robot to change course on the fly when it discovers leaves and other material near its route.
Underwater eyes are changing the landscape for pool robotics, but there’s a lot more to cleaning a pool than just seeing where the dirt is. It has to actually collect it, too. Here’s how the new Scuba fared when I put it to the test.
Big Battery, Short Running Time
Photograph: Chris NullThe Scuba V3, as the name suggests, is a continuation of Aiper’s long-running Scuba line of treaded robots, featuring a rather no-nonsense, boxy design in dark gray with blue accents. At just 18 pounds, it’s on the light side for a robot with its feature set, its central roller brush scrubbing the floors, walls, and waterline of your pool. Equipped with a 10400 mAh battery, the unit charges via an included charging dock, so there’s no need to worry about connecting and disconnecting a cable with each run. While that’s a large battery, Aiper specs the system with a maximum running time of just three hours—quite short in today’s market. Charging from zero takes about five hours.
The 3.5-liter debris basket is a two-piece affair, with a secondary basket inside the primary one. This secondary basket is wrapped with a removable ultrafine mesh. While it is washable, Aiper recommends you replace this mesh component after every 30 runs.
Aiper’s AI vision system is currently trained to detect 20 different types of debris—and to distinguish debris from obstacles in the pool. Also, alongside its front-mounted camera, you’ll discover one additional unique feature: two LEDs designed to let the Scuba V3 detect foreign objects in the dark.
Hitting the Pool
Photograph: Chris NullAfter removing a significant amount of plastic film from the device, I charged the Scuba V3 overnight on the small charging dock. This dock, unlike many others on the market, does not need to be assembled; a hinged pair of legs simply swivels out from the body, after which it needs only to be plugged into wall power to be ready to go. The robot sits on the dock, inclined at an angle (which helps with any water drainage), making contact with two metal plates on top of the base station. A gentle beep lets you know when the robot is properly situated.
ScreenshotAiper app via Chris NullAiper has a mobile app, connecting via Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi to your home network. Naturally, this app only does anything when the robot is out of the water, though the Scuba V3 can alert you when it’s done cleaning by climbing to the waterline of the pool and sending a signal from there. (More on this later.)
From the robot’s control panel, four operating modes are available: floor-only mode, wall mode, waterline mode, and auto mode, which cleans all three regions. Floor mode can be configured within the app to use the AI camera as an option, and in auto mode, it’s always on by default. You can tell whether AI and camera are activated in any mode if the icon shows up as blue; icons are green if the AI camera is disabled.
The app also includes access to two scheduled operational modes for those who would like to leave the robot in the pool, including a calendar-based mode with three frequency levels—90 minutes x 2, 60 minutes x 3, or 45 minutes x 4. The other mode is a bit of a letdown: The so-called AI Navium mode sounds like it uses the AI camera to periodically survey the pool over the course of a week and perform a routine cleaning only when required—but in reality, this mode merely performs a quick analysis of your previous runs and then uses AI to create a schedule for the next few days, based on how you’ve used the robot in the past.
Hungry for Gunk
Video: Chris NullThe Scuba V3 made fairly quick work of debris in my pool during test runs, rarely needing more than a couple of hours to scoop up all visible detritus on the pool floor while also scrubbing the walls and waterline. The AI camera system does seem to work as advertised, even locating small pebbles I tossed into the pool and dutifully routing itself to collect them. With organic debris, the pool looked fully clean after each run (ending between 170 and 190 minutes each time), and with synthetic debris, the Scuba V3 achieved a 96 percent cleanliness rating, with just a few test leaves remaining in some difficult corners. That’s especially good performance given that three hours is not a lot of operating time. And note there’s no way to adjust the running time outside of the scheduled modes; on-demand modes always run the battery until it’s nearly dead. Fortunately, Aiper does seem to make the most of this time, formally specifying a maximum coverage area of a significant 1,600 square feet.
I unfortunately didn’t have much success with the AI schedule mode. After running the analyzer, the app suggested a baffling five-day schedule comprising two floor runs, two floor-plus-waterline runs, and a final floor run. It then ignored the schedule and promptly ran a three-hour floor run, which drained the battery completely. I tried again the next day, and the robot missed its schedule, then ran randomly late in the night. I wasn’t a big fan of leave-it-in-the-pool scheduling before testing the Scuba V3, and this showing didn’t improve that opinion.
Video: Chris NullWhen finished with a run, the Scuba climbs to the waterline and sends a push notification to the app, alerting you that it’s ready to be collected and cleaned. Note that you only have 10 minutes to reach it: The Scuba can’t float, so it has to use the last of its juice to run a motor to tread water and hold itself in place. After that 10 minutes is up, the spent Scuba sinks to the floor of the pool and must be retrieved with a pool and hook. My best advice is to set a 175-minute timer each time you launch a run to remind you to watch for the completion notification.
Cleanup can be somewhat involved. The filter basket design features a large lid that makes it easy to access the inner filter, and hosing down both of these filters clean is straightforward. The removable mesh on the interior basket is another story, though. While it’s very effective at capturing dirt and other very fine debris, it’s quite difficult to clean, and if you don’t remove it from the basket, lots of debris gets caught between the mesh and the basket itself. Removing and replacing the mesh is difficult, especially when it’s wet, so I usually just left it in place and cleaned it the best I could after each run, accepting that it would never be perfect. I expect most users will do the same.
Photograph: Chris NullAiper’s app provides basic logging for each run, noting running time and square footage cleaned. It’s also supposed to tell you how much debris it found when in an AI-active mode, but my logs always read “xx pieces of trash are recognized,” implying that this logging feature was not yet complete.
On Sale for Now
The Aiper Scuba V3 carries a list price of $1,400 but is currently available for $1,000. A solid price, though one that’s short of a bargain. Users with very large pools may find the unit’s short battery life a deal-breaker, but its other features—namely, solid performance and the inclusion of the cordless charging station—definitely swayed me deeper into its camp.
$1,400 $1,000 at Amazon$1,100 $1,000 at Aiper
