The Roborock couldn’t match the Roomba S9 Plus’ impressive ability to clean up pet hair, but it fared better than most. The S7 wiped hardwood floors completely free of hair and left only a few stray tufts on carpeting. The Roomba S9 Plus also struggled a bit cleaning sand from low-pile carpeting, earning a low average dust and sand pickup of 28%. While not the worst result we’ve irobot vacuum cleaner seen (that honor belongs to the Ecovacs Deebot 600 at 18%), it’s definitely near the bottom. But we’ve put the current AI bots to the test in the real world, and they aren’t that good yet. Certain models are pretty good at avoiding certain obstacles, but none of them reliably avoid every kind of common floor clutter, and some models don’t deliver on their promises at all.
Eufy makes several RoboVac models built on the same base as the 11S but with extra features. The 11S is quiet enough that you could easily forget that it’s running if you’re home at the time. We measured the volume on the bot’s maximum suction setting and found that it was just 57 dBc, a full 5 decibels quieter than the Roomba 694—that’s a major difference. On its normal suction setting, the 11S operates at just 53 dBc, sounding more like a fan than a vacuum cleaner . And since the 11S stops short of most obstacles, it avoids creating many of the bonking impact noises that the rougher Roomba 694 makes. Other basic Eufy models have slightly stronger suction and can be a couple of decibels louder, but they are still quieter than most competitors.
This robot’s software is designed to enable it to recognize solid pet waste on the floor and steer clear of it. With a competitive price, plus rock-solid performance and intelligent navigation, the Roborock S7 is our new favorite midrange robot vacuum. It demonstrated about the same power to remove sand from hardwood floors (92.8%) as the Roomba S9 Plus (93%) and Neato D7 (95%). Reflects the average time it took the robotic vacuum on its max-clean setting to clean our greater than 600 square foot test room over 3 test runs. This system looks silly, and some people simply can’t stand to watch it.
Because of the range, options will vary in each product’s smart features, suction power, battery life, and cleaning capabilities. Before selecting the best Roomba for your needs, consider your cleaning goals and review these common shopping considerations. This Roomba isn’t going to win any awards for quiet operation, bissell crosswave cordless but it sure can clean up dirt! It cleaned our flour “dust” on the first pass and easily sucked up flour out of crevices between floorboards, where other robot vacuums left it. It has the power to vault over raised thresholds and automatically finds high traffic/high dirt areas where it should spend more time.
The main downside to smart mapping is that, like anything that increases the complexity of a system, it adds more opportunities for something to go wrong and disappoint you. With the best models, mapping glitches don’t happen often, but problems will eventually crop up for everyone who owns one of these bots. At some point, you might have to erase your old maps and retrain the robot. Even Shark and Samsung joined the laser-nav bonanza (after previously releasing robots that used camera-based smart navigation), with the Shark AI Robot Vacuum RV2000 series and the Samsung Jet Bot and Jet Bot AI+, respectively. Of the three, we’ve tested only the AI+, and we wouldn’t recommend it based on its cleaning abilities. We’re confident that the Shark model and the lower-end Samsung bot will work similarly to all the other laser-nav robots described in the previous few paragraphs.
Also, we’re not convinced that obstacle avoidance is really the holy grail of robot-vacuum technology. One of the reasons robot vacuums help your home feel so tidy is that they force you to pick stuff up off the floor. Even if advanced obstacle recognition worked well enough to let you skip the pre-tidying, your home would still feel messy. Some high-end robot vacuums now include advanced obstacle recognition in their navigation systems. In theory, these systems should help the robots drive around any floor clutter they find, and even assist them in avoiding hazards like dog turds. Siri Shortcuts worked a little better in our tests since we could customize the wording of our voice commands, but their overall functionality is limited.