The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

Robot vacuums nab pet hair, lint, Vacuums Robot and dust off floors before they can settle. They can also avoid stairs and other obstacles, including tippy furniture.

Most robotic vacuums require regular maintenance. This includes emptying the bin (and occasionally, rinsing it) and wiping the cameras and sensors. They also require to be plugged in. Many come with smartphone apps for scheduling, setting up settings, and more.

iRobot Roomba 960

The iRobot Roomba 980, the most recent in a line of top-of-the-line robot Vacuums Robot, is a staple for every modern home. This model is equipped with a HEPA filter that can aid those suffering from allergies. It also has a large battery that can clean for two hours before returning to its dock automatically when the bin is full.

Smart mapping is another feature that helps it identify areas of your home that require attention and provides a path for vacuums robot cleaning around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a great job of moving around toys left scattered on the floor vacuum robot or furniture legs that stick out of the ground. It also has a camera that can snap the Roomba back to the real world when it begins to drift from its actual location.

iRobot has also added a new set of rollers underneath the Roomba's bottom that do not have bristles, and thus tend to resist tangles more than the previous models. They are also taller and can be placed under beds or couches with low sides. They're specifically designed to make this model more movable on various kinds of floors.

The Roomba 980 is distinguished from other high-end models by its new dirt detection feature, which makes use of a camera in order to identify dirt that has been embedded. This is a significant improvement over the previous version which relied on a sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around a room and clean it at minimum three times from various angles.

The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on carpets and hard floors. Its score on the low pile carpet was excellent and it got a very excellent score on mid pile too. It did a decent job of removing pet hair, but it struggled with extremely thick and long pet fur that was clumped together.

Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our best-performing robots, and it's even far from being as costly as the other top-of-the-line models in this list. It has a lot of features you'd expect from a top model but does not have all the fancy apps and smart home integration you'd see in other top models.

The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and start running right away. After taking off the pull tab for the battery and the yellow bin insert from the undercarriage, all you have to do is plug it into its Home Base docking station or an outlet on the wall, press its large "Clean" button, and let it get to work. It will automatically return to its dock when it has run out of batteries or is full of debris. There are also indicators at the top of the bin that let you know the bin is empty, when it needs to recharge, or when it loses Wi-Fi.