Enhanced maps, the ability to clean specific objects, custom routines, seasonal suggestions, and intuitive smart home integrations.³ The iRobot Home App gives you ultimate control over your clean. Detects and maneuvers around life’s clutter, like cords, pet waste, socks, and shoes, to get the cleaning done right for you—without you having to lift a finger. Founded in 1990 by a trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticists, including Angle, iRobot’s early ventures led to rovers that could perform military and disaster-relief tasks in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. While not really a feature I consider essential for operation, the G20 has a remote control option in the Eufy Home app, which means it can also double as a fun cat toy. The Eufy G20 Hybrid has a bristle / rubber brush, a side brush , and a mop pad. The Eufy G20 Hybrid is a small, svelte robot vac that’s perfect for tackling smaller jobs with less fuss.
Some cheap, dead-simple bots are especially nimble, while certain high-end models struggle constantly. But for the most part, modern robots are pretty good at navigation, and many models now give you the option to draw invisible boundaries around problematic areas using a smartphone app. We will also continue to monitor reports and how and why robot vacs are using your data, but when it comes to object-recognition robots, we just don’t think they are worth your time, money, and possible privacy tradeoffs—yet.
And while it is well-designed — easy to fill the fresh water and empty the dirty water tank — it does get a bit smelly. The i3 has an attractive woven plastic gray top — a nice change from most shark cordless of the shiny black plastic you find in this category . It still gets stuck on common robot traps such as phone charging cables, cat toys, and, in my house, the skinny feet of a lounger chair.
The Roomba i3 EVO is a standalone vacuum, but the i3+EVO comes with a self-emptying dock. But generally, if you want a cheap robot vacuum, I suggest looking at the ones from iRobot. Even the cheapest iRobot vacuums have features like Dirt Detect, where it automatically spot cleans, that I have yet to see pop up in any other line.
On the robot vac itself, you’ll find a power button and a home button; the latter can send the device back to the dock or tell it to spot-clean if you hold it for a few seconds. We found that all three responded to voice commands very well; this was most evident in how the robot always reacted after our first request, no repeat commands necessary. And like the Roomba i3 EVO, the Q5 does allow you to ask Siri to clean specific rooms.
The Eufy 11S ($120) is very short, to fit under the lowest cabinets. In my testing, I have found that Yeedi vacuums have trouble making it back to the dock, but otherwise, their battery life and room navigation are excellent. When you swap out the Shark’s vacuum bin for the mopping bin, you can see it wiggle as it scrubs the floor.
The vacuum uses LiDAR to map and navigate along with infrared drop sensors to detect stairs, but it kept mistaking the base of my cat condo for stairs and asked to be moved away from it. Though it claims a whopping 180 minutes of runtime, it ran down at 110 minutes and died before it made it back to its base. But for staying ahead of dust and dirt buildup, bissell crosswave cordless they’re solid investments that will save you time, and as part of an overall cleaning schedule they make a lot of sense. The Shark IQ XL navigates efficiently in a linear fashion and easily gets over and around furniture. It’s the only vacuum out of the 11 we tested that was able to get up and over the base of barstools without getting stuck.