My xiaomi uses wifi to communicate to the app on your phone and its dock. The app is useful, you can specify a zone to clean from a previous lidar scan of your place, have it come and do a spot cleanup, establish schedules or trigger a clean while you are away, or you can control it manually with directional controls.

That being said I think it would still work fine without the wifi doing a whole area clean with the button on the top, it just might say its having trouble finding its dock and you would need to carry it home after its finished.