It’s triple-brush design easily collects debris, but can be hard to clean. The robot may have occasional issues with navigation, and may get stuck unexpectedly or sporadically hit an obstacle. In addition to that, this is a model that does not automatically map your home. The dock is fairly light, so it’s best to have it set against a wall to prevent sliding when docking.
Some of the higher-end Roombas also include intelligent features that allow the vacuum to “talk” to the robot mop, allowing a tag-team approach to cleaning. Most robot vacuums are made to suit certain surfaces better than others. Overall, however, Roomba vacuums tend to be most effective in uncluttered areas on solid surfacing or on low- to medium-pile carpeting.
It’s not designed for cleaning high-pile rugs, and may struggle greatly on shag carpeting. The onboard bin is fairly shallow, and may need to be emptied before a cleaning cycle is completed. If you do not empty the bin or check for tangled hairs regularly, it will affect the performance of the robot vacuum. In fact, a full bin will result in it dragging any mess around the floors rather than picking it up. The Neato D9 provides a solid cleaning performance, scoring a respectable 92.79 overall on our tests. It picked up almost 93% of kitty litter carpet, which ranks it above the Eufy RoboVac X8 Hybrid, and its predecessor, the Neato D4.
The Roborock S7 is a mapping robot that uses lidar sensors to map your home in minutes. It also gives you the option of room-specific cleaning commands and allows you to set keep-out zones. This is essential as it doesn’t have AI obstacle avoidance, so will get stuck in regular robot traps such as clusters of cables.
The battery life will generally range from 60 minutes with more basic versions to about 120 minutes at the higher end. Those who want their Roomba to cover more square footage may prefer a model with a longer battery life, or perhaps two robots to cover different zones or floors. For our hard floor straight-line pickup tests, large and small debris is deposited onto a marked area of the floor (based on the width of the opening of the robot vacuum’s nozzle). Then each robot vacuum irobot vacuum cleaner is allowed 10 minutes to pick up the debris from the floor and the weight of the dustbin is taken to find how much debris is picked up by each. Straight-line pickup tests on carpet are done in an enclosed area where we deposit mixed debris including potting soil, sand and rayon fibers meant to mimic hair. Each robot vacuum is allowed to clean the carpet for a specified length of time, and the weight of the dustbin is taken to find out how much debris each robot can pick up.
We’re currently testing the Roborock Q5, the replacement for the discontinued Roborock S4, our former pick for the best laser-nav robot vacuum. We’re also trying out the Samsung Jet Bot AI+, another laser-nav bot with obstacle recognition. There are tons more laser-nav robots, with largely similar specs and appearance, including bots from barely there brands, including Tesvor, Dreametech, Viomi, and Honiture. Again, our educated guess is that they all probably work okay and are just more prone to app glitches and less likely to get useful software updates over time than the best brands in this category.
The Roomba works by using smart sensors that allow the robot to adjust to your home’s features and layout. These sensors also allow Roomba to navigate under and around furniture, and dyson robot vacuum along edges, while the Cliff Detect technology keeps it from falling down stairs. The auto-adjust cleaning head automatically adjusts its height to clean carpets and hard floors.
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. 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%). The robot zipped through our test room in a short average time of 25 minutes, too.
Plenty of models can reliably clean homes both small and large, by moving in an orderly path throughout your home, and making a map of where it has or hasn’t been. They rarely miss patches or waste time re-cleaning areas that they’ve already visited. If their batteries run low before they can finish cleaning an entire level of a home, they’re smart enough to drive right back to their dock, recharge for a few hours, and pick up where they left off. 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.