She recently tested all of the robots that were submitted for awards in this year’s Best Cleaning and Organizing Awards and contributed new information for this story’s most recent update. Carolyn Forté, the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Home Care and Cleaning Lab Executive Director, has over 40 years of experience testing and writing about all kinds of vacuums. Two of the newer picks in this story were tested by Forté personally and by our panel of consumer testers in consideration for the most recent Good Housekeeping Best Cleaning and Organizing Awards. All of our picks can clean your hard floors and carpets, even in large homes with pets. The iRobot Roomba J7+ has a multitude of features, like the rest of the Roomba vacuum cleaners, though it offers a couple of additional extras and improvements.
When you add up all those little optimizations, the S4 Max saves a noticeable amount of time compared with other bots. A possible side effect of the Roomba i3 EVO’s design is that it may be relatively slow compared with other smart-mapping bots, like our other top pick, the Roborock S4 Max. Although those other bots use lasers or cameras to help them map and clean areas, the i3 EVO still utilizes gyroscopes to help it navigate. Laser-nav bots can learn your home’s layout in a single session, whereas the i3 EVO and higher-end Roombas typically need two or three sessions of training. The laser-nav bots also tend to bump into less stuff than the Roombas do and complete their jobs faster as a result.
We tested many of the newest Roomba products from iRobot, including six robot vacuums and one robot mop. We used real-life situations to test the robots’ cycles and monitored their ability to navigate common obstacles, from cords to furniture. This unit actively captures dyson robot vacuum thousands of measurements in order to identify different rooms and areas of the home. Once the home is mapped, users can use the app, Google Assistant, Alexa, or voice control to guide the unit to specific areas and cleaning tasks while also avoiding keep-out zones.
It also has the option of a self-emptying bin / dock, and iRobot sells this all as a bundle for $1,300. The hot thing in robot vacuums a few years ago was sticking a cloth attached to a tiny liquid reservoir underneath the bot and calling it a mopping robot. These were very ineffective at mopping, and they took away from the capacity of the dustbin, a key feature if you don’t have an auto-empty dock. If you need a basic bot that will get the job done and don’t mind ditching the fancy features of the higher-end models, this is a good option.
But we’ve put the current AI bots to the test in the real world, and they aren’t that good yet. Certain models are pretty good at avoiding certain obstacles, but none of them reliably avoid every kind of common floor-clutter, and some models just don’t deliver on their promises at all. Aided by multiple sensors and lasers, efficient navigation is the S7’s strong suit. The vacuum cleaner covered the entire floor of our test room in an average of just 16 minutes. The Roomba S9 Plus also struggled a bit cleaning sand from low-pile carpeting, earning a low average dust and sand pickup of 28%.
More advanced models require you to set up a map and define the zones of your house you’ll want them to clean or stay away from, and even the best vacuum can get stuck and need human intervention. If you’re pressed for time or have a pet who sheds, a good robot vacuum is a worthwhile investment. Like the Eufy 11s, this vacuum uses random, or bump and run navigation, so while it does take time to clean the house, it covers every room.
All of that said, this still gets its place on our best robot vacuum ranking due to its impressive mopping technology, effective vacuuming, self-sufficiency, and relatively affordable price tag. Roborock says it will manage up to three hours of continuous cleaning in its least powerful mode. During testing, we used the middle-of-the-road ‘balanced mode,’ which meant 30 minutes of cleaning over an area of 20 square meters depleted the battery by 20% – a decent level of performance. In most homes, we think a bot will stay in good shape if you do about 15 minutes of maintenance per month, maybe a little more if the bot has a heavy workload. For bump-and-run bots, it’s a good strategy to keep the dock near the middle of your home so that the bot will cross its path more often, increasing the chance that it finds and successfully re-docks when the battery runs low. For all bots, you need to leave a few feet open around and above the dock.