The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
Robot vacuums eliminate pet hair, lint, and dust from the floor before they can settle. They also can avoid obstacles like stairs and other obstructions, including tippy furniture.
Most robotic vacuums require maintenance, like emptying (and occasionally rinsing) the bin, and wiping sensors and cameras. Additionally, they must be connected to a power source. Many come with smartphone apps to schedule, adjust settings and more.
Roomba 960 from iRobot
The iRobot Roomba 980, the latest in a series of top-of the-line robot vacuums, is a staple for every modern home. This model is equipped with a HEPA-filter that will help those who are allergic. In addition it also has a powerful battery that can clean for up to two hours, and it automatically returns to its dock when it is full.
It also has a feature called smart mapping, which makes use of multiple sensors to determine the areas of your home that require attention and create a cleaning path around them. This technology is very effective in navigating around toys left on the floor or furniture legs sticking out underneath things. It also has a camera sensor that can snap the Roomba back to the real world when it starts to drift from its intended location.
iRobot has also introduced a new set of rollers beneath the Roomba's bottom, which do not have bristles, and thus tend to resist tangles more than earlier models. vacuum mop combo than previous rollers and can better fit under beds and couches with low sides and are designed to allow this model to move more easily across a variety of flooring types.
The Roomba 980 is distinguished from other models with a high-end price tag by its new dirt detection feature, which makes use of cameras to detect embedded dirt. This is a nice improvement over the previous version, which relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around the room and clean it at minimum three times from various angles.
In our tests of its performance, the Roomba 980 did well on both hard flooring and carpets. Its score on low pile carpet was excellent and it got a very high score on mid pile too. It did a good job of removing pet hair, but it was struggling with very long and thick pet fur that was stuck together.
Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our top-performing robots, and isn't even nearly as expensive as some of the other top models on this list. It's still packed with a variety 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 you might find in other top contenders.
The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and get up and running immediately. After taking the yellow bin insert and the battery pull tab from its undercarriage you just plug it into the wall socket or one of its Home Base docking stations, hit the "Clean button" and let it do its work. It will automatically return to the dock when it is running out of battery or becomes full of sand. There are also indicator lights on top that show when the bin is empty, or when it requires recharging, or if it loses Wi-Fi.