The iRobot Roomba is equipped with a laser sensor that directs it around obstacles and walls. It also has sensors on the underside of the device that detect changes in elevation, allowing it to transition from bare floor to carpet. It has beater brushes like a conventional vacuum cleaner to loosen and collect dirt, as well as suction that sweeps the dirt into bissell crosswave cordless a storage compartment. Top robot models have a proprietary VSLM feature — Vision Simultaneous Localization and Mapping — that takes snapshots as the Roomba works to guide the unit in an efficient path throughout the room. As a vacuum, the S7 was pretty good — it’s not the best with pet hair — but it was fast and thorough, scoring a pick up average of 93.
The simplest robot vacuums navigate back and forth, in long Z-shaped rows, avoiding obstacles as needed. However, the newest generation of robot vacuums feature on-board cameras or LiDAR laser mapping, which they use to construct a map of your home for guided cleanings. Today, the best robot vacuums offer a full suite of cleaning tools and assorted bells and whistles. This article was written by Erin Johnson, a commerce editor at The Spruce focusing on appliances, cleaning, and organization. She has hands-on experience testing upright, cordless, handheld, and robot vacuums and mops and has developed and led tests in The Lab.
It gets our vote for the best of it’s kind with AI which utilizes an RGB camera and 3D structured light to quickly learn the home, tailor cleaning strategies, and auto-generate paths according to the type of obstacle, flooring, and room. The battery provides up to 300 minutes of runtime on the lowest suction setting. However, despite its D-shaped design, which Neato says is suitable for edges and corners of rooms, we found it struggled to collect all of the debris from the corners and crevices of the baseboards in our home. Look no further than this model if you want a robot vacuum that’s great for collecting pet hair and other dust and debris. If you love the idea of a robot vacuum that can mop and vacuum, but you’re on a budget – this hybrid floor cleaner from Eufy is well worth considering. At just under half the price of the Ecovacs Robovacs that can mop as well – and often discounted – this certainly comes with a more affordable price tag.
While we factor in the average cleaning time to our overall rating, we give it less importance than cleaning effectiveness, as most people will schedule a robot vacuum to go about its rounds after they leave their house. IRobot’s newest offering, the Roomba j7+ is one of the best Roombas because of its obstacle avoidance technology. With this, it can essentially detect everyday objects, such as cables and socks and steer clear of them.
But for computer vision in robot vacuums to truly work as intended, manufacturers need to train it on high-quality, diverse data sets that reflect the huge range of what they might see. “The variety of the home environment is a very difficult task,” says Wu Erqi, the senior R&D director of Beijing-based Roborock. Road systems “are quite standard,” he says, so for makers of self-driving cars, “you’ll know how the lane looks … [and] how the traffic sign looks.” But each home interior is vastly different. Vacuuming an ever-changing household is a complex task, and no robot vacuum is perfect.
This isn’t the robot vacuum to get if you want the most polished experience – and you may very well want that if you’re dropping $1,000 on one – but it remains a powerful vac-and-mop machine with a handful of extra perks. The key criteria I look for in a robot vac are good battery life, a big bin (or shark cordless an auto-empty option), a large rubber roller brush (less prone to getting tangled up than bristles), the ability to map your home, and an easy-to-use app. Many other features on top of these will make your life even easier (check out my list at the end of this guide), but these are the essentials.
Despite their many joys, the best robot vacuums can be quite pricey – although prices are definitely coming down. So to ensure you get the most cleaning bang for your bucks, we’ve tested eight of the leading models in our own homes to really put them through their paces. We’ve put all their key features to the test – runtime, suction power, mapping and automation capabilities and more – to help you find the best robot vacuum for you and your home. To find the best bots for your buck, we’ve spent the last several years torture-testing the top robotic vacuums in our lab and in our homes.