When it finds an especially dirty area, it automatically goes into Dirt Detect mode and moves over the offending spot multiple times until it’s sufficiently clean. IRobot recently updated this model with smart mapping capabilities, so you can send it right to specific rooms by phone or voice for targeted area cleanings. The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are meant only to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t place much weight on them when we’re deciding which models to recommend. We’ve found that as long as a robot has a brush roll and a side brush, it’ll pick up crumbs, tufts of pet hair, and other common debris from bare floors and low-pile rugs. That’s enough to keep most homes tidy, and most owners seem happy with those results. If you have thicker rugs, or if you just feel like owning a stronger bot, go ahead and spend a little more on a bot with better brushes or stronger suction.
Multiple small tufts of hair remained after vacuuming low-pile carpeting. Many more and larger clumps of hair stayed behind after the vacuum traveled over this surface. The robot zipped through our test room in a short average time of 25 minutes, too. The dock both charges the robot’s battery and empties its dustbin automatically, making cleaning even easier and keeping you from worrying about battery life. The next important task for a robot vacuum is to cover as much ground as possible, as efficiently as possible. Plenty of models can reliably clean homes, both small and large, by moving in an orderly path throughout the home and making a map of where they have or haven’t been.
A version without the auto-emptying dock is available, too; it’s simply called the S7. As with all products that CR tests, the ratings robotic vacuums earn across our battery of tests and our surveys inform the Overall Score for each model. As you scroll through the models, we recommend considering the model’s weight and size, noise level, reliability, and pet friendliness . You can find our ratings across these criteria and more in our comprehensive ratings of robotic vacuums.
The bots might even (semi-randomly) miss a patch of floor or even an entire room in any given session. But if you run the bot at least a few days per week, your floors should stay pretty tidy. And again, we’ve found over and over again that such bots work well in smaller spaces. Tons of engineering choices affect the way robot vacuums handle obstacles. The Electrolux Pure i9 is an oddity that we want to love but can’t recommend. 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.
It’s really up to you, but the advantage of a robot vacuum is that it can clean floors more often than many people are willing to vacuum. If you schedule it to run every few days, or even every day, dust and crumbs never have a chance to accumulate, leaving your floors feeling cleaner than they would without a bot. In most homes, a bot is likely to stay in good shape if you do about 15 minutes of maintenance per month, maybe a bit more if the bot has a heavy workload. For all bots, be sure to leave a few feet open around and above the dock. If the dock is in a cluttered area or under a piece of furniture, there’s a good chance the bot will not re-dock.
The Roborock app offers the most accurate smart mapping of any robot vac we tested. The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are meant only to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story. With a slim profile, it easily cleans under coffee tables, couches, and other areas that are difficult to reach bissell crosswave cordless with a stick or upright vacuum. And with built-in sensors, the vacuum avoids bumping into furniture and other obstacles. For example, remapping a single room, seeing what’s been cleaned on a current job and what still needs to be cleaned, if a job is cancelled for some reason being able to finish just what was missed later, etc.