We tested the claim out with a fake turd made from Nutella and oatmeal, and it worked great. The j7 spotted the faux feces from a few feet away , and then methodically worked around it, never getting closer than about a foot. It also did a good job staying away from a power strip, power cord, and USB cable. But it didn’t recognize (or at least didn’t try to avoid) our other obstacles, including toys, a sock, a shoe, and a water bowl. We like this bot for a lot of other important reasons , and the obstacle recognition is almost like a toss-in feature, so it’s not a bad buy. The company has a good history of following through on those kinds of promises, but you should expect the improvements to trickle out over several years, not months.
We also fully disassembled some popular bots to get a sense for the build quality and how straightforward they might be to repair. If you have thicker rugs, or you just feel like owning a stronger bot, then go ahead and spend a little more on a bot with better brushes or stronger suction. The next important task for a robot vacuum is to cover as much ground as possible, as efficiently as possible. It just informed us in the app, after the session was over and the Nutella smeared everywhere, that there were many objects on our floor and that we should pick them up.
If you’re looking for a vacuum with all of Roomba’s best features , go for the s9. It’s about as technologically advanced as Roombas get, featuring Wi-Fi and app integration, learned mapping and navigation, and compatibility with both Alexa and Google Assistant. But, where this model shines is in its ability to clean—and we mean really clean—the entirety of your home. But just because you’re not spending a lot of money on a smart unit doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a clean house. In our testing, we found there are some models that clean really well and can do almost as good a job as a higher-priced option.
You no longer have to suffer the indignity of dragging around an unwieldy plastic hose connected to a clumsy, wheeled canister the size of a Galapagos tortoise. There are many good robot vacuums available to help you dispose of dust, pet hair, and other debris in your home—without needing to lift a finger. We’ve rounded up our highest-rated robot vacuums, and provided a few pointers to help you find just the bot you’re looking for. The affordable Wyze Robot Vacuum methodically zips around your home sucking up dust and pet hair from hard flooring and carpet thanks to top-notch laser mapping and efficient route planning. The 11S is quiet enough that you could easily forget that it’s running if you’re home while it’s working.
You’ll pay more money for these models, but you get the capability of setting schedules, designating specific rooms to be cleaned and using voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant to control your vacuum. As with other inexpensive robots, you can only set a single daily schedule; the V3S Pro also offers three cleaning modes — whole floor, spot and edge — accessible from the included remote. Depending on the size of your house, a robot vacuum can save you anywhere from minutes to hours of your time every week by taking care of a pretty thankless chore. While any vacuum can clean bare floors, some models make the task a little easier. The laser rangefinder method has become the dominant tech , and is excellent at quickly learning a home’s layout.
The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are only meant to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t weigh them too heavily when we’re deciding what to recommend. We’ve aimed to recommend a handful of robots that should work well in most homes while not being wildly expensive. But plenty of models that we don’t explicitly recommend can be good or great, too, and we cite many of them throughout this guide.
The j7+ did the best job at creating and letting us adjust a map of our test area. She previously spent eight years as a PCMag reporter, and prior to that was a reporter for SC Magazine, covering hackers and shark cordless computer security. She has also written for several newspapers, including The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania.
As of late 2021, it’s no longer one of iRobot’s “core” products and won’t be available through as many retailers as other models, 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+ or Roomba i8+. The Roomba i3 stands out from other brands’ robots at this price mostly because it’s more durable and easier to repair.