Meanwhile, the company continues to expand beyond its most-famous devices, looking to bring robots into more homes. Robot vacuums are recommended more for light, everyday cleaning, rather shark pet hair vacuum than for handling really embedded debris. So, ideally you will still want to run your regular vacuum every so often, while the robot vacuum helps keep dust down in the interim.
There are robot vacuums to honor every price, budget and style preference. Whether you have less than $200 to spend or over $1,000, these smart investments can free up your personal time and offer a hygienic home environment. If an upright vacuum isn’t cleaning the way it should anymore, the Samsung Jet Bot+ is a worthwhile replacement. This best robot vacuum for carpet uses LiDAR sensors that can be controlled and tracked on your phone.
This allows the 980 to offer better cleaning performance on thick carpets. The Roomba i3+ EVO strikes a nice balance between performance and price. It has the same self-emptying dust bin like on the S9+ and i7+ as well as wifi-connectivity and app control. It’s the most expensive, but it’s objectively the best performer with the most features. Bottom line, it’s arguably the best robot currently being sold anywhere. It has got convenience, digital mapping, keep out zones, and extraordinary performance.
For example, you could send the robot to vacuum your kitchen and dining room after dinner while skipping the bedrooms and den so that the bot doesn’t disturb you while you’re relaxing or studying or whatever. And then you could tell the bot to clean those rooms at a time of day when nobody is around. Another option is to set up do-not-cross lines or no-go shark robotic vacuums zones, which is a great way to keep bots out of areas where they tend to get stuck or make a mess (like around pet food bowls). The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are meant only to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t place much weight on them when we’re deciding which models to recommend.
If you were to schedule the vacuum to run while you’re at work, however, there’s a good chance that it would run out of battery trying to find the docking station. One feature that really surprised me with this vacuum was the cliff sensors it uses to sense and avoid stairs and ledges. The first time the robot shark pet hair vacuum approached my stairs, I was nervous and stood closely to snag the vacuum just in case it decided to take a tumble. Every time it approached the stairs, it would clean right to the ledge and then turn around. Instead, pet owners who want a robot vacuum for their furry animals should opt for the AV993 IQ model.
In one test, the basic Eufy RoboVac 11S spent an hour picking up enough debris to fill the palm of our hand. Next we ran the Neato Botvac D7 (usually $700 when it was a current model), and it picked up only enough hair to coat the filter and a bit of dust. Then we ran the iRobot Roomba s9+ (usually $1,100), and it came back with barely anything in the bin. We repeated the experiment a few days later and got the same results. Wirecutter’s Liam McCabe wrote the previous versions of this guide, evaluating some 200 robots and testing close to 50 models since 2012. We now recommend the iRobot Roomba i4 EVO (and the iRobot Roomba i4+ EVO, with included dock) as the best robot vacuum.