Rachel Cericola is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter who has been covering smart-home technology since the days of X10. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Men’s shark robotic vacuums Health, USA Today, and others. She hopes her neighbors read this bio because it would explain why she always has four video doorbells running simultaneously outside her home.
However, once it noted there was an obstacle somewhere, the vacuum would avoid that area in the future. We spoke to cleaning experts to narrow down the best brands and models you can buy today, and we tested eight popular vacuums to find which perform the best in terms of cleaning, obstacle avoidance and smart features. On that note, there is still a place in the world for cheaper robots that rely on semi-random navigation. (We like to call it bump-and-run navigation.) If you need to clean only a few rooms at a time (800 square feet is a comfortable upper limit), one of these models can get the job done. We can’t pinpoint one spec or feature that helps a robot navigate well—we just have to test the bots and see how they do.
But the VibraRise feature can only clear low-pile rugs, so I set a no-mopping zone around my plush floor coverings. IRobot’s Roomba j7 is the best of the best, offering excellent cleaning power, an impressive app, plenty of extra features, easy repairability, and a stylish design for around $600. If you have pets, children, or just lots of foot traffic and find it hard to keep up with your floors, this will shark robotic vacuums do the dirty work for you. Stick or sweeper vacuums are the middle ground between an upright and a handheld vacuum. Lightweight and battery powered, they offer the convenience of a handheld but feature the upright construction of a traditional vacuum, making them better for cleaning up spills on hardwood floors. They are most commonly used for quick cleanup areas, such as kitchen and bathroom floors.
The Roomba i3+ can be controlled via an app as well as with Alexa and Google Assistant, so you can create a schedule and connect it to smart home devices. Unlike the more expensive Roomba i7+ and s9+, though, the i3+ can’t be directed to map individual rooms. When Colin Angle was a junior at MIT, he decided it was time to start thinking seriously about a career. This being the late 1980s, he saw in the emerging field of robotics the potential for boundless opportunity and creativity.
Aside from the extra suction, those are all nice-to-haves rather than must-haves, so most people – including you! It’s the fanciest robot vacuum iRobot has to offer, but you’ll get a similar level of quality with the Roomba j7 while spending a couple hundred bucks less. They’re smarter, more powerful and (marginally) better at avoiding chair legs than they ever were before, and some of them even have built-in mopping capabilities. It’s safe to say the space is pretty saturated now, with established names like iRobot and Shark competing with companies like Anker and TP-Link that are not necessarily known for their dirt-sucking tech.
For example, we attached a tracking device to robotic vacuums we tested to rate their navigation skills, and we challenged them to clean up a mix of cereal, rice, and yellow peas to rate their cleaning capacity. To learn more about how we rate and test robot vacuums, consult our vacuum buying guide. On top of these calculations, we factor in the reliability and owner satisfaction score of robotic vacuums from surveys based on members’ experiences with more than 9,000 robot vacuums.
shark robotic vacuums have a feature called Smart Sensor Navigation that allows them to sense the presence of furniture, objects, and other obstacles. The vacuum avoids obstacles in its path so your cleaning job isn’t interrupted. You’ll pay more for a model with higher-quality sensors, but a vacuum of this caliber will also clean more quickly and efficiently. Many robot vacuums cope well with hardwood floors and carpeted areas, but if your home has many staircases, you’ll need an additional vacuum to clean the stairs. With many robot vacuums suitable for programming from your phone, you’ll be able to switch these devices on when you’re out and about and come home to clean floors.
This easy-to-use model makes quick work of small spaces and is easy to schedule using the Shark Clean app. The iRobot Roomba S9+ is self-emptying when it reaches a certain level in its bin. The debris is captured in a 14.9oz / 440ml replaceable dust bag in the charging and emptying station. This makes it an awesome choice for those who suffer from allergies because all the dust is contained, and there is no fear of emptying any of it back out again (by accident) if you open it. Alerts when the bag needs a change and integration with Alexa and Google Assistant are a sweetener to an already excellent robot vacuum.
Robot vacuums do not offer as strong a performance as upright vacuum cleaners, particularly corded ones. It’s for this reason that we don’t recommend throwing away the best vacuum cleaner even if you decide to invest in one of these strong contenders. Not long ago, the company sold its 40 millionth home robot, and Roombas continue to outsell offerings from a growing army of floor-cleaning robots.
After an iRobot team worked for three years, the company was ready to release a robot vacuum for the home. It was tentatively named “Cyber Suck,” though that was mercifully changed to the Roomba. Angle had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and was part-way through a doctoral program before finally deciding that changing the world via robots was the kind of thing better suited to the boardroom than the classroom. In 1990, he left school and founded what would become iRobot with Brooks and fellow MIT graduate Helen Greiner. They tried out a few names for the fledgling company before settling on iRobot, a nod to internet-connectivity and Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction novel I, Robot. Over that summer, Brooks and Angle refined the robot, with Angle concentrating on the hardware and low-level programming and Brooks focusing on the high-level AI.