u/Aggravating-Pack-117 — reddlx

Hi all,

Planning a built-in setup for a plumbed self-cleaning robot vacuum: dock sits inside a base cabinet (water supply + drain plumbed in), bottom panel and toe-kick removed, robot drives in/out through the toe-kick opening as if it were a small garage. Maintenance is easy — just open the cabinet door.

Physical clearance is fine (8 cm robot, 10 cm toe-kick, 20 mm of headroom — no risk of scraping). My concern is purely about navigation / software:

To the robot's LiDAR or top-mounted sensors, the plinth above the toe-kick opening looks like a solid wall — the actual passage is below the sensor's line of sight. So:

Will the robot understand that the toe-kick opening is a passable gap leading to its dock, or will it map it as a wall and refuse to approach? Does starting the first map run with the robot already on the dock change this?
IR docking from an enclosed space: does the dock's IR beacon project cleanly out through the toe-kick, or do reflections off the cabinet walls cause docking failures?
Anyone running a similar setup already? Specifically a plumbed dock built into a cabinet with the robot entering through the toe-kick. What model are you using, did it just work out of the box, and would you do anything differently?
Model recommendations for this exact use case — the "Slim" variants from Roborock and Dreame are marketed for low-profile docking, but I'd love to hear if they actually work in a fully enclosed cave.

Photos and concrete experiences very welcome. Thanks!