The robots here combine spinning brush rolls and side brushes to clean your home just as well as their upright equivalents. And they’re slim enough to travel underneath most couches and tables, so you don’t have to rearrange the furniture. IRobot is one of the most respected names in the robot vacuum market, and the Roomba i3+ EVO is its most affordable model with a self-emptying dustbin. Beyond offering greater convenience than their more manual counterparts, bissell crosswave cordless self-emptying robot vacuums significantly limit your exposure to dust, a big plus if you suffer from allergies. As robot vacuums get more technologically advanced, with laser navigation sensors and home security cameras, they’re also getting bigger and taller. Measuring 12.8 inches in diameter and 2.85 inches tall, it’s one of the smallest robot vacuums we’ve tested, meaning it can clean where a lot of other robot vacuums won’t fit, like under couches.
Instead, the ILife V3s has two edge sweeping tools on the front to help guide dirt into its path and a strong suction underneath to pick up everything. This means you won’t have to cut tangled hairs out of the bottom of your vacuum every few weeks since everything gets sucked away. Roomba uses a patented 3-stage cleaning process to vacuum your carpets, hardwood, tile, and laminate floors on its own, automatically adjusting to different floor surfaces as it moves through your home. You can even watch your robot vacuum operate no matter where you are, using Samsung’s SmartThings App.
We also liked that it has two edge-sweeping tools to help pull dirt and hair into the path of the vacuum, ensuring that no debris is left behind. The object-avoidance features help it to navigate through your space without running into furniture or walls, and we found during our tests that it could even detect and avoid objects, like socks, in its way. Though the Eufy RoboVac doesn’t have mapping technology to memorize the layout of your house, it does come with two 6-foot boundary strips to block off certain areas of your home. This allows you to keep it away from rooms with toys, laundry, or cables on the floor that could potentially get sucked up. It also has an object sensor that allows it to avoid ramming into walls and furniture, so you’ll only need to keep small clutter out of this vacuum’s path.
To take a look at how it compares, this is an overview of the best iRobot vacuums. “In order to teach the robots to avoid humans and images of humans”—a feature that it has promoted to privacy-wary customers—the company “first needs to teach the robot what a human is,” Baussmann explained. “In this sense, it is necessary to first collect data of humans to train a model.” The implication is that faces must be part of that data. That means that it’s up to the service provider to decide whether or not to take on certain work. For Hive, Guo says, “we don’t think we have the right controls in place given our workforce” to effectively protect sensitive data.
Designed to navigate your home and clean your floors automatically, robot vacuum cleaners are made to tackle this chore so you don’t have to. Powered by rechargeable batteries, the robot typically sits on a charging dock to top off its energy supply. Premium models come with docking stations that can also empty the robot’s dustbin when it’s full. Most companies in this space advertise power in pascals (Pa), the metric unit of pressure, though iRobot doesn’t always make this information easy to find. In general, the more power, the better, especially if you have carpet, but battery life and obstacle avoidance capabilities are also important factors.
A strategically-designed corner brush that’s unique to this model helps it get into hard-to-reach places. This 4.4-star-rated Shark IQ Robot vacuum (RV912S) cleans your whole home in neat rows. It lacks the advanced smarts of more expensive robot vacuums, but this is one of the most affordable robot vacuums with a self-emptying base you’ll find. The Anker Eufy 25c robot vacuum doesn’t skimp on features — it connects to your home Wi-Fi and can be controlled through an app or through your home’s smart speaker. It has 1,500 Pa of suction, three-layer filtration and a slim profile that helps it get under furniture to clean.
You just clip on a water reservoir (no cleaning solution allowed with most models) and a microfiber pad behind the vacuum intake, and the bot wipes the floors while it vacuums. Eufy makes several RoboVac models built on the same base as the 11S but with extra features. You can connect the Roomba i3 EVO to your Wi-Fi so that you can use a smartphone app to tell it to start or stop, instruct it to return to its dock, or create a cleaning schedule, if you’d like, though doing so is totally optional. Since we first tested this model, iRobot has added smart mapping, which allows the i3 EVO to run through the house, without cleaning, in order to create a single floor plan that is saved in the app. You can then label rooms and tell the vac to clean specific areas (or avoid ones that are particularly cluttered).
We found that it worked equally well on both carpet and hardwood, only faltering once when transitioning from a hard floor to the rug. The 0.6-liter dust bin can hold a larger amount of dirt compared to other robot vacuums we tested, so you won’t necessarily have to clean it out after every completed job. Plus, its battery runs for up to 100 minutes, meaning this little machine can power through multiple rooms in the house before needing to recharge. If you’re in the market for a proficient midrange hybrid that works best as a mop, the Bissell SpinWave Wet and Dry is a top choice. We recommend this model for homes with pets or difficult-to-clean hard flooring.
It’s no longer one of iRobot’s “core” models and isn’t available through as many retailers as others, but you can still find it in plenty of places for now. The functionally identical Roomba i6 is also common, as are the auto-emptying Roomba i6+ and Roomba i8+. To test the obstacle-recognition feature on some new high-end robots, we use a variety of objects, including shoes, pet bowls, cat toys, and cords. We’ve even put a fake dog turd (made of a mix of Nutella for the look and texture and oatmeal for bulk) in the path of a robot vac to see if it can avoid smearing the mess all over the floor.