It’s a nimble navigator that rarely gets stuck, though it works best when it has to clean only a few rooms at a time. The owner’s manual for each device clearly outlines how to perform regular maintenance like cleaning cameras and emptying dustbins. Via the app, Roombas also will inform users when and how to perform other maintenance such as removing, cleaning, or replacing rollers or brushes.
It also features a self-emptying dustbin, good battery life, impressive obstacle avoidance, and strong vacuum suction power. Although robot vacuums are weaker than traditional vacuums, they can reliably pick up most kinds of floor debris, and they work on most bare floors and carpets. Shark’s non-laser robots are reasonably priced and look great on paper but are just okay in the real world. They’re also pretty loud on bare floors, sounding sort of like a two-stroke lawn mower puttering in the distance. To their credit, they seem to be strong cleaners, particularly on bare floors. However, we don’t think chasing the very best cleaning performance is worthwhile.
The Roomba 694, on the other hand, was easy for us to strip down and then reassemble with just a screwdriver. 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. The Roomba 694, like most affordable robots, is what we call a bump-and-run navigator.
An original roomba model robotic vacuum is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, which they note as the first successful domestic robot. The robot vacuum is described as being able to change direction when it encounters an obstacle or infrared beam, and is powered by a battery. All models have a patented design using pair of brushes or rollers, rotating bissell crosswave cordless in opposite directions, to pick up debris from the floor. In some models, the brushes are followed by a squeegee vacuum, which directs the airflow through a narrow slit to increase its speed in order to collect fine dust. A horizontally mounted “side spinner” brush on the right side of the unit sweeps against walls to reach debris not accessible by the main brushes and vacuum.
The Shark AI Robot VacMop did not avoid any obstacles, nor did it even acknowledge in the app that it encountered any. The Trifo Max worked fine in our tests, nothing impressive or obviously bissell crosswave cordless bad. Owner reviews suggest it gets lost pretty easily, isn’t built to last, and has poor customer service. We haven’t tested Trifo’s other models, but we would expect similar results.