It also comes with a special pet hair-specific roller brush and a mop attachment. A mapping robot, the Shark has room-specific cleaning and app-enabled keep-out zones. It also has a handy Zones feature that lets you select areas of your house — say, half the living room and the hallway — to clean on a schedule. This is useful for regular, quick cleans in high-traffic areas, and it doesn’t need to be set up every time you run it, as with some clean zone options.
The Roomba s9+ is admittedly overkill for most people – but it’s nothing if not one of the best robot vacuums out there. The s9+ is the biggest but also the most attractive robo-vac I tried, with a corner-friendly design, copper accents and a 1.5-foot tall clean base. The setup was quick and easy, with the machine taking only a few minutes to connect to my home’s WiFi and the iRobot app. With the app-controlled, WiFi-enabled Shark IQ Robot Self-Empty XL, you can set it and forget it for up to 30 days.
Beyond offering greater convenience than their traditional counterparts, self-emptying robot vacuums significantly limit your exposure to dust, a big plus if you suffer from allergies. The Roomba i7+ is one of the most advanced robot vacuums on the shark canister vacuum market today. It can easily connect to your smartphone for remote control and has the best cleaning performance in a robot vacuum that we’ve tested to date. Stick or sweeper vacuums are the middle ground between an upright and a handheld vacuum.
When it comes to vacuuming prowess, we want to know how effective each robot is against common crumbs and other debris, and also how it fares against much smaller particles like dust, dirt and sand. To find out, we use dry, uncooked black rice as a stand-in for the crumbs, and sand as an analogue for finer particles. The company’s products are easy to obtain online and through local retailers. We also found most of their current models have positive reviews. The support staff is solid, and they have a VIP warranty if you’re interested in extended coverage.
I’m PCMag’s expert on fitness and smart home technology, and I’ve written more than 6,000 articles and reviews in the 10-plus years I’ve been here. I unbox, set up, test, and review a wide range of consumer tech products from my home in Florida, often with the help of my pitbull Bradley. I’m also a yoga instructor, and have been actively teaching group and private classes for nearly a decade. Both of these manufacturers produce a quality robot vacuum and depending what your needs on, they may be met by any one of these models listed above.
Many models will even automatically register what type of floor they’re currently cleaning and change suction or brush features to optimize cleaning for that floor type. Our testing showed that the ECOVACS DEEBOT N8+ Robot Vacuum and Mop, our Best Overall pick, excels at recognizing the difference between carpet and non-carpeted surfaces and cleans accordingly. It beat out all the others in mapping, creating virtual boundaries and detecting and avoiding obstacles, which means it’s the best “set it and forget it” smart robot vacuum — and it even empties itself. More importantly, it picks up dust and debris and cat litter from hardwood floors and low-pile carpeting better than the others we tested. Upright vacuum cleaners are ideal for large, carpeted areas of the house.