I have become surprisingly attached to it, like a little robotic cleaning pet. When it has caught and screwed up bits of paper or got stuck somewhere, I’ve felt more sorry for it than annoyed. I’ve then made a special effort to keep things off the floor, which is all round a good thing. The iRobot Roomba 880 costs £600, which is at least £300 more than most other normal vacuum cleaners.
But even with a good robot vacuum cleaner, you’ll still have to tidy your home before you start a cycle for a proper clean. To tackle this job, you’ll need a robot vacuum cleaner like Neato Robotics D4. Yes, it’s expensive, and ultimately a luxury, but if you are thinking of investing in a smart cleaner, it’s worth doing and if you can stretch to it, I’d recommend bissell crosswave cordless going for one with smart mapping and automatic dirt disposal. Disappointingly, on its first outing the robot doesn’t clean as well as a human with a decent, ordinary vacuum cleaner. But Roomba is designed to clean once a day rather than once a week, which means the first run takes a while because the bin is small and has to be emptied several times.
Using its laser rangefinder and bump sensors, the S4 Max learns your floor plan in a single cleaning session and creates an interactive map in the companion app. That map enables a bunch of cool tricks, like targeted room cleaning and no-go zones, without having to manually move the bot or fiddle with physical barriers like you would with other robots, including our other picks. The S4 Max isn’t the only robot with a smart-map feature, nor is it the cheapest, nor does it always work perfectly. The Roomba i3 EVO is also a better cleaner than most robot vacuums—at any price. We also tried the opposite, running the i3 EVO before the Roborock S4 Max, and found that the S4 did not come back with much debris in its bin, likely because the Roomba i3 EVO grabbed it all first.
The robot is powered by a rechargeable battery contained in the unit. The 11S is the most basic, and is one of the few robotic vacuums still available that doesn’t connect to the internet. Other RoboVac variants, including the 30C, 35C, and 15C Max, do have WiFi connectivity, which allows you to use a companion app to turn the robot on or off, steer it manually, and set a cleaning schedule. Tired of constantly sweeping up or vacuuming dust, crumbs, and other debris from your floors? 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.
In this approximately 37-minute podcast, Allison and Darrell Hilliker learn all about their new iRobot Roomba E5 vacuum cleaner. On hard floor, the M8 Pro coped with the rice cleanup almost as well, with only 1g of rice not making it to irobot vacuum cleaner the collection bin. The scatter was wider here, and there were a fair few grains remaining on the floor, but again, it’s a superb performance. The system worked well when collecting our measured rice spill on both carpet and hard floor.
This design is based on MIT researcher and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks’s philosophy that robots should be like insects, equipped with simple control mechanisms tuned to their environments. The result is that although Roombas are effective at cleaning rooms, they take several times longer to do the dyson robot vacuum job than a human would. The Roomba may cover some areas many times, other areas only once or twice, and may miss some areas. However, the random algorithm has been shown to effectively cover rooms of various sizes and configurations, particularly when used repeatedly for maintenance cleaning.
The “everyday” prices are a bit high, but we’ve seen some pretty good deals on the version of the Shark that comes with the self-emptying dock. Since we know laser-nav bots are all pretty similar to one another, this Shark could be a good choice if you see it on sale. It struggled to cross from floors onto rugs without getting stuck. The Roborock S4 Max has the most clever, controllable navigation you’ll find in any robot vacuum.