One judge, adrift in a sea of court filings, bemoaned “the morass of arguments and sniping” between the feuding companies. Still, for the next decade, shark dustbuster iRobot’s competitors failed time and again. It was really hard, back then, to make a robot that anyone would want to bring into their home.
It also did a good job of staying away from a power strip, a power cord, and a USB cable. But it didn’t recognize (or at least didn’t try to avoid) our other obstacles, including toys, a sock, a shoe, and a water bowl. We like this bot for a lot of other important reasons (expected durability, cleaning power, smart navigation), and the obstacle recognition is almost like a toss-in feature, so it isn’t a bad buy. Will it actually learn to avoid more stuff, as iRobot says it should? The company has a good history of following through on those kinds of promises, but you should expect the improvements to trickle out over several years, not months. Most robot vacs with object-recognition rely on an onboard camera, which not only identifies obstacles (such as cords and stray socks), but takes an image of the purported clutter so you can see what was avoided.
I even turned it on during work hours and experienced no distractions. The only thing is, if you have stairs, I’d advise you to put up a dog gate, otherwise the vacuum automatically stops in front of them and asks to be brought back to its dock. The Roomba j7 robot vacuum uses iRobot Genius Technology and PrecisionVision Navigation to recognize and avoid common objects in its way like cords, pet waste, socks and shoes. Picking up before you clean is now a thing of the past, so add this iRobot Roomba to your smart home collection today. Now the Roomba i3+ EVO robot vacuum is smarter than ever, learning and mapping your home room-by-room so it can clean the room you want when you want—with 10x the Power-Lifting Suction and Premium 3-Stage Cleaning System. MIT Technology Review spoke with or sent questions to 12 companies selling robot vacuums and found that they respond to the challenge of gathering training data differently.
You can connect the Roomba i4 EVO to your Wi-Fi so that you can use a smartphone app to tell it to start or stop, instruct it to return to its dock, or create a cleaning schedule, if you’d like, though doing so is totally optional. Since we first tested this model, iRobot has added smart mapping, which allows the i4 EVO to run through the house, without cleaning, in order to create a single floor plan that is saved in the app. You can then label rooms and tell the vac to clean specific areas (or avoid ones that are particularly cluttered). We’ve concluded that the Roborock Q5’s smart mapping works better, but this new addition to the i4 EVO makes it slightly smarter than it was previously.
Miele, which sells the RX2 Scout Home Vision, has turned its focus toward other smart appliances, like its camera-enabled smart oven. When it comes down to sheer cleaning performance and ease of use, the iRobot Roomba s9+ is the obvious choice for your home. It delivered the most thorough clean of all the robot vacuums we tested, effectively picking up large debris, dirt and fine dust particles from a variety of flooring surfaces.
This will not do much to mop your floors, but it does help with fine dust and debris on hard floors. Available as a vacuum G20 or vacuum / mop G20 Hybrid, Eufy’s G20 robot vacuum is a sleek and silent bot that does very well in small spaces, while the mop version is a good option for hardwood floors. The j7 is one of the loudest vacuums I’ve tested (hence the propensity to be silenced by a household member). But I like how easy they are to repair, a crucial factor for an expensive gadget you’d like to use for many years.
We won’t get too deep into it here since we have a whole guide to affordable robot vacuums with additional recommendations. But suffice to say, the 694 gives you all the essentials you’d expect from a robot vacuum, along with all of the convenience that comes with iRobot’s mobile app. Arguably the most compelling reason to get a robot vacuum at all is convenience, and iRobot managed to figure out how to incorporate mopping into an already stellar robot vacuum without removing any convenience. Sure, you have to add water and cleaning solution when you want to mop, and dispose of the remnants when it’s finished, but that’s about it. The Roomba has enough smarts to take care of the rest, without accidentally dampening your carpet along the way. The included clean base still comes in handy as it will suck up the vacuumed debris that the robot catches, but just know that it will not take care of excess water for you.
It’s important that anyone using a camera-equipped robot vacuum understand that the bot may inadvertently record images that many would consider private, such as photos of people, including children, in the home. Those images may be sent to the cloud and shared with third-party companies (such as those that analyze photos), in order to improve the vacuum’s capabilities and features. Judging from our experience, it can be useful in spaces as large as 1,000 square feet, as long as you run it most days of the week as a habit and can forgive that it might not thoroughly clean every room every time that it runs. But some people don’t want to deal with unpredictable coverage, and that’s understandable. If you want a smarter robot, take a look at our top pick, the iRobot Roomba i4 EVO, and our also-great pick, the Roborock Q5.
Plus, it has dual spinning side brushes that are designed to capture debris from edges. The vacuum’s multi-stage filtration captures 99.9 percent of dust, pet allergens, and dander. The mop cleaning and drying process is efficient, and in theory, you don’t need to remove the pad after every run. But I recommend throwing it in the washing machine when emptying the dirty water tank.