We were surprised the first time the 11S disappeared under a bed—and then more surprised when it reemerged with an unholy amount of cat hair stuffed into its bin and wrapped about the brush roll. The Roomba 694, like most affordable robots, is what we call a bump-and-run navigator. Basically, it bloops around semi-randomly until its battery runs low, and then it tries to get back to its dock before it completely runs out of juice (and doesn’t always succeed). It looks silly, but it’s basically effective, especially in smaller spaces. This is the Roborock Q5 packaged with a charging dock that sucks all the debris out of the robot after a cleaning session. The iRobot Roomba i4 EVO works well in most homes, large or small, because it drives in orderly, back-and-forth rows, keeping track of where it has or hasn’t been, so that it doesn’t miss any big patches of flooring.
Also, unlike the iRobot vacuums, the Shark doesn’t have a self-empty automatic bin sensor. That means that it doesn’t know when its bin is full and will just keep going. However, it does place itself back on the dock accurately, you don’t need replacement bin bags, and the self-emptying does work, unlike some other robot vacuums I could mention (I’m looking at you, Yeedi). If you’re familiar with robot vacuums, you know that they tend to be pretty finicky about placement.
That’s good for you as a consumer, because it means that you’ve got a good variety of robot vacuums to choose from that all offer comparable cleaning capabilities across various price points. All the vacuums that made our best robot vacuums for hardwood floors list also do well on carpet, too—the iRobot Roomba 694 even sucked sand out of the carpet, which one might consider a feat for any vacuum. Still, the real trouble might come with the transition over the edge of an area rug to carpet—if it’s thick enough, you might have to give your robot vacuum a little nudge to keep on keeping on. The Roomba i7+ is one of the most advanced robot vacuums on the 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. The Samsung Jet Bot AI+ robot vacuum has a bunch of cool features, including 30 watts of adjustable suction, 3D object recognition with AI and powerful LiDAR navigation.
A young but growing industry, data annotation is projected to reach $13.3 billion in market value by 2030. The 15 images shared with MIT Technology Review are just a tiny slice of a sweeping data ecosystem. IRobot has said that it has shared over 2 million images with Scale AI and an unknown quantity more with other data annotation platforms; the company has confirmed that Scale is just one of the data annotators it has used. In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.
My in-laws still have a Roomba they bought in 2007, and it works great. While parts are costly, they are readily available, including mechanical bits like wheels and the entire cleaning module. Roborock, for example, doesn’t sell spare parts beyond bags, bins, and brushes on its accessories site; you have to ship the robot to the company for any repairs. Aside from not pushing poop across your floors, the Roomba J7 Plus excels at other things, too.
It rarely misses any accessible areas of a home, as random-navigation robots (including our budget picks) sometimes do. In our tests, even when it did bump into an object its lidar turret didn’t detect, it course-corrected more quickly and more accurately than other bots. Then there are the top-of-the-line Roomba s9 and self-emptying Roomba s9+, which we do not recommend. Instead of the classic puck shape, the s9 has a D-shaped body and extra-wide brushes intended to improve its edge-cleaning and corner-cleaning abilities. It also has four times more raw suction than the already-strong Roomba i4 EVO, i7, and j7.
For a premium performance at an affordable price, the iLife V3s Pro is the one to get. It’s not a smart robot vacuum, but the remote controls it effectively. Here’s the best robot vacuums you can buy right now based on our testing and reviews. While the Jet Bot+ has high cleaning power on almost every floor type, it has even higher suction on carpets and rugs. Don’t get your hands dirty—the CleanStation removes dust automatically using Air Pulse technology. It maps floors and divides rooms by sections to create the most efficient path.
Also consider the Eufy RoboVac 11S, which is so quiet and nimble that it blends into the background like no other robot (apart from the dozen or so clones from Eufy itself and other brands). This basic, bump-and-run bot sounds more like a desk fan than a vacuum—even if you’re home while it works, you’ll barely notice it running. It’s shorter than most bots, which lets it glide under more furniture, picking up plenty shark pet hair vacuum of hidden debris. The big downside is that the RoboVac 11S and other bots like it don’t seem to be built to last for more than a couple of years on average, and we’ve heard about plenty of unrepairable breakdowns that happen even sooner. Finally, whether you decide to go with a self-emptying vacuum or a standard model, be sure to read up on our robot vacuum tips to get the most out of your new cleaning companion.
Designed to navigate your home and clean your floors automatically, robot vacuum cleaners are made to tackle this chore so you don’t have to. They can clean on demand, on a schedule and even when you’re not home. Powered by rechargeable batteries, the robot typically sits on a charging dock to top off its energy supply. Premium models come with docking stations that can also empty the robot’s dustbin when it’s full. We sent a privacy and security questionnaire to the companies that make our picks and compiled the key portions of their responses in the table below.
If you’re using a standard charging base, you may have to fix it to the wall, so the robot vacuum won’t knock it out of place. If you’re lucky enough to own a robot vacuum with a self-emptying base, it should be heavy enough to hold itself in place. Although this does mean it will likely require more clearance space and will protrude further out from the wall as well. Make sure you have a space in mind for your robot vacuum’s dock before you make a purchase, otherwise you might have to move some furniture around. First and foremost, you should follow the directions in your instruction manual for where to place the robot vacuum.