With a variety of controlled tests at our disposal, we evaluate them for their suction power, navigation smarts, ease of use and their ability to clean different kinds of messes from carpets and hardwood floors alike. The S series also includes linking technology that allows the Roomba to communicate wirelessly with other iRobot products, where the Braava shark cordless Jet M6 can automatically be set to mop after the s9 has finished vacuuming. The iRobot Roomba j7+ might induce sticker shock, but it’s one of the smartest standalone robot vacuums you can buy. It uses a built-in camera and machine learning technology to recognize obstacles in its cleaning path in real time and automatically reroute itself around them.
If you would like to do the work of choosing yourself, here’s the list of all our robot vacuum reviews, ranked by pet hair performance. While no vacuum is perfect for every use, most are good enough to please almost everyone, and the differences are often not noticeable unless you really look for them. The expensive machine has a longer setup process because its clean base comes in two pieces. You must attach the bottom of the base, where the robo-vac charges, to the garbage-bin upper portion using a few screws and a tool that attaches to the bottom of the base. Roborock provides everything you need to do this in the box, so while it takes a bit more time, it’s still an easy process. It’s also louder than the j7 when it’s cleaning, but not irritatingly so, and I noticed a deeper clean in my carpets thanks to the extra suction.
IRobot’s Roomba vacuums are iconic gadgets, and this top-scoring model yet again showed us why. Impressing with its pick-up on all tests, large crumbs, finer dirt and even pet hair posed no problems. Plus, if you want to save, there’s currently £500 off our joint winner, making now a great time to invest. They’ve developed over the years too, now boasting greater pick-up power, larger dust canisters and, in some cases, self-emptying capabilities. All the models on our list work with Google Home or Alexa too, and are app-controlled, so you can set your vacuum to work even when you’re not at home.
Vacuum Direct also carries replacement batteries and AC power supplies to keep your favorite robotic home-cleaning unit full of juice and ready to go. Several available iRobot replacement parts also exist to ensure that your Roomba stays as autonomous as possible, like the room-limiting Auto Virtual Wall and replacement remote controls for bissell crosswave cordless several models. Dreame manufactures robot vacuums that are also rebranded and sold by other companies—an indication that this practice could be employed by other brands as well, says Giese. Most robot vacuum companies MIT Technology Review spoke with explicitly said they don’t use customer data to train their machine-learning algorithms.
To find out, we use dry, uncooked black rice as a stand-in for the crumbs, and sand as an analogue for finer particles. The Eufy 11S is the most basic and one of the few still available that doesn’t connect to the internet. Other Eufy variants, including the 30C, 35C, and 15C Max, do have WiFi connectivity, which allows you to use a companion app to turn the appliance on or off, steer it, and set a cleaning schedule. The mop cleaning and drying process is efficient, and in theory, you don’t need to remove the pad after every run. But I recommend throwing it in the washing machine when emptying the dirty water tank. We bought one of the Goovi models, and lo and behold, we found that it was functionally identical to the 11S, with many of the same components and even the same beep and boop sounds.
Even this $1,000 robot vacuum bumped into a few table legs while cleaning, but it was noticeably better than other machines at navigating around my furniture and correcting itself when it got stuck. It also moves faster than the j7, so it was able to cover a bit more of my apartment before it had to return to the base for charging after about one hour of cleaning. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the s9+ wasn’t nearly as loud as the j7 vacuum when emptying its dustbin into the clean base. Arguably the most compelling reason to get a robot vacuum at all is convenience, and iRobot managed to figure out how to incorporate mopping into an already stellar robot vacuum without removing any convenience. Sure, you have to add water and cleaning solution when you want to mop, and dispose of the remnants when it’s finished, but that’s about it.
Some models come with docking stations that double as a disposal unit too, automatically empty their canisters when they return to the docking station. This will dramatically reduce how often you’ll need to clear it – our two top-scorers, for example, claim the container can house up to 60 days’ worth of dust before it needs disposing of. The Roomba 675 is the exact same as the Roomba 614, just with the addition of Wi-Fi features, says the brand.