She is a graduate of West Virginia University’s Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism. The Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge, Roborock E4, and Ecovacs Deebot 601 all use a similar nav system as the irobot vacuum cleaner Roomba i3, but we seriously doubt that they’ll be as durable as the Roomba. We dismantled an older Eufy RoboVac 30, and major repairs are impossible without breaking parts of the robot.
After testing dozens of robot vacuums, he is neither worried about AI nor holding his breath for self-driving cars. He enjoys visiting factories and learning about regulatory loopholes, and has flooded our testing area only three times. There are tons more laser-nav robots, with largely similar specs and appearance, including bots from barely there brands, including Tesvor, Dreametech, Viomi, and Honiture. Again, our educated guess is that they all probably work okay and are just more prone to app glitches and less likely to get useful software updates over time than the best brands in this category. Another surprisingly useful upside to the basic Eufy bots is the short body.
The Roomba 694, on the other hand, was easy for us to strip down and reassemble with just a screwdriver. The Eufy 11S is not meant to be taken apart and put back together—major dyson robot vacuum repairs are impossible without breaking parts of the robot. Using a noise-meter app, I also measure the volume and frequency of each bot from about 10 feet away as they work.
Several excellent options, including the iRobot Roomba i3+ and Shark IQ Robot Self-Empty XL, are now available for less than $600. The iLife A9 robot vacuum cleans hard floors and low-pile carpet with aplomb, supports app and voice control, and won’t break the bank. Many of these robot vacuums can also pair with a smartphone app, which lets you command the bot to clean specific rooms or sections of a room, while ignoring other areas. This “smart mapping” tech is incredibly convenient, and one of the most compelling reasons to spend a little extra on a robot. Some high-end robot vacuums now include advanced obstacle recognition in their nav systems. In theory, these systems should help the robots simply drive around any floor clutter they find, and even avoid hazards like dog turds.
It also has much more suction than the 600 series bots, which helps its bare-floor pickup. This is one of the most affordable robots smart enough to memorize a home’s layout and then quickly and gracefully clean specific rooms or zones on command via smartphone app. This is the Roomba i3 packaged with a charging dock that automatically sucks all the debris out of the robot after a cleaning session.
But some great robots rely instead on a camera or gyroscopes , and they also get the job done—just a little bit slower, bonking into more stuff, and with a slightly higher chance of missing area. We bought one of the Goovi models, and lo and behold, we found that it is functionally identical to the 11S, with many of the same components and even the same beep and boop sounds. The biggest problem with the RoboVac series is that they don’t last as long as Roombas do, and they can’t be fixed when they break. About a year after the 11S was released, we started to hear from owners whose bots had already died, and the complaints have kept on coming.