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 Ecovacs Deebot Ozmo T8 AIVI is a pricey 2-in-1 robot vacuum and mop with excellent battery life, the ability to identify and avoid obstacles, and a unique home monitoring feature. Along with the software updates, the Roomba i3 EVO and i3+ EVOrobot vacuums see a price cut of $50. The plus in the model name indicates the model includes an auto-empty charging base that sucks the dirt out of the robot’s bin for you.
Some simply have too little suction or too little clearance to properly handle thick, high-pile carpet. When choosing a vacuum, you’ll want to look on each robot vacuum’s product page to find out what carpet height it can handle. While most suggest only low-pile carpet or flat-weave rugs, some vacs can ramp it up to medium pile or even fluffy, high pile. The name “Roomba” has almost become synonymous with robot vacuums — and iRobot’s automated house-cleaners are still the best in their class.
Compatible with your smartphone through the iRobot HOME app, you can conveniently control and schedule your Roomba e5’s cleaning sessions. Thanks to its intelligent sensors, including a cliff sensor, the Roomba e5 is capable of making up to 60 decisions per second to sufficiently navigate your home. Through the app, you can even set no-go areas for the Roomba to avoid. However, we find that the battery is the shortest-lived part of a robot vacuum. Both nickel and lithium batteries have hard limits on the number of times they can recharge.
These bins and filters work together to form the efficient dirt storage that has come to define iRobot’s product. Many homes have areas that aren’t always ready for a vacuum to roll through. Roombas have customizable keep-out zones, so users can create spots where the robot vacuum knows not to venture. This might mean staying clear of an area of tangled cords under a desk, a irobot vacuum cleaner playroom’s toy zone, or the dog’s water bowl. Users can give specific areas names such as “living room” or “kitchen” for custom schedules and voice activation. For instance, if there are crumbs under the kitchen table, users can tell their Roomba to “clean under the kitchen table.” Areas of the home where children or pets might be playing can be set as “off-limits” areas.
You might even prefer the simplicity of leaving everything to the bot, and never having to think about an app. And again, we think the Roomba i3’s rug-cleaning ability and expected sturdiness are very good reasons to consider this robot at this price. In another test, I pour out about an eighth of a cup of all-purpose flour across an area rug and bare floor and let the bot try to suck it up for a couple of minutes. This dust-pickup test gives me a visual gauge for each bot’s raw cleaning power. At 77 dB on high suction power, the s9+ was by far the loudest model we tested, and even in quiet mode, the vacuum is not unnoticeable.
Any opinions, analysis, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of our partners. Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. We steer you to products you’ll love and show you how to get the most out of them. It combines this data with information from its infrared and object sensors to inform its movements. Automatically trap allergens and dander inside the vacuum to stay healthier in your home. Decent suction paired with meticulous object avoidance make the j7+ handy for homes prone to clutter.
The Roomba 694, like most affordable robots, is what we call a bump-and-run navigator. Basically, it bloops around semi-randomly until its battery runs low, and then it tries to get back to its dock before it completely runs out of juice (and doesn’t always succeed). It looks dumb, but it’s basically effective, especially in smaller spaces. Roborock also makes some souped-up versions of the S4 Max—all very similar robots, just with slightly different features. You might find our writeups about extra features like mops, obstacle detection, and self-emptying docks useful, too.
When once this didn’t solve the problem, they sent me a shipping carton to send the robot in for service, eventually replacing the robot. Keep a can of compressed air handy in case you need to blow dust out of gears or other hard-to-reach nooks in the bot. Wipe the sensors clean as needed, according to the manufacturer’s guidelines—usually with a microfiber cloth or cotton swab with a little water or rubbing alcohol. The Shark AI VacMop did not avoid any obstacles, nor did it even acknowledge in the app that it encountered any obstacles.