The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
Robot vacuums remove pet hair, lint and dust from floors before it can settle. www.robotvacuummops.com help avoid stairs and other obstacles, including tippy furniture.
Most robotic vacuums require maintenance. This involves emptying the bin (and occasionally, rinsing it) and wiping the cameras and sensors. Also, they need to be plugged into the power source. A lot of them have apps for smartphones for scheduling, setting up settings, and more.
Roomba 960 from iRobot
The iRobot Roomba 980, the most recent in a line of top-of-the-line robot vacuums, is a must for every modern home. This model is equipped with a HEPA-filter that will help those who are allergic. It also has a powerful battery which can clean for two hours and returns to its dock automatically when the bin is full.
It also has an option called smart mapping that uses multiple sensors to help it suss out the areas in your home that need attention and create a cleaning path around them. This technology is extremely effective in navigating around toys left on the floor, or furniture legs that are sticking out from underneath things. It also has a camera sensor that snaps the Roomba back to its original position when it begins to drift from its actual location.
iRobot also added an additional set of rollers beneath the Roomba that don't have bristles, and are therefore more likely to withstand knots than earlier models. They're also a bit higher than the older rollers and can better fit under low couches and beds, and they're designed to let this model move more easily on varying floor types.
What makes the Roomba 980 stand out from other high-end models, though, is its inclusion of a new dirt detection feature that utilizes cameras to identify bits of embedded dirt. This is a nice improvement over the previous model, that relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom cover method to bounce around the room and clean it at least three times from different angles.
In our tests of its performance it was found that the Roomba 980 did well on both hard flooring and carpets. It scored highly on low-pile carpet and also on mid-pile. It did a great job picking up pet hair but struggled with long and thick pet hair that was stuck together.
Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our best-performing robots, and it's not even close to being as expensive as some of the other top-of-the-line models in this list. It's got plenty of features that we'd expect to see in a flagship model however, it doesn't come with all the fancy app-enabled functions or smart home integration that you'll find in other top models.
The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and start running right away. After you have removed the battery pull tab and yellow bin insert from undercarriage, all that you need to connect it to its Home Base docking station or an outlet on the wall, press its big "Clean" button and let it go to work. It will automatically return to its dock when its battery runs out or it's stuffed with debris, and it also has indicator lights on the top of the device to indicate that its bin is full or it's time to recharge or its Wi-Fi signal has gone out.