The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
Robot vacuums take pet hair, lint, and dust from the floor before they settle. They also help avoid stairs and other obstacles such as furniture that is tippy.
The majority of robotic vacuums require regular maintenance. This includes emptying the bin (and sometimes, rinsing it) and cleaning the cameras and sensors. They also require to be connected. A lot of them have apps for smartphones for scheduling, setting and more.
Roomba 960 from iRobot
The iRobot Roomba 980, the latest in a series of top-of-the-line robot vacuums, is a must for any modern home. This model is equipped with a HEPA filter that can aid those suffering from allergies. On robots that vacuum and mop of that it also has a powerful battery which can clean for up to two hours and it will return to its dock when its bin is full.
It also comes with a feature called smart mapping that uses multiple sensors to identify the areas in your home that need attention and then create a clean route around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a good job of maneuvering around toys that are left scattered on the floor, or furniture legs that are sticking out of the ground. It also has a sensor that snaps Roomba back to reality when it begins to wander away from its original position.
iRobot has also introduced a new set of rollers underneath the Roomba's bottom, which don't have bristles and, therefore, tend to resist tangles more than previous models. They're also higher than the older rollers and are able to fit under beds and couches that are low, and they're designed to let this model move more easily on varying floor types.
What sets the Roomba 980 apart from other models with a higher-end price tag however, is its integration of the new dirt detection feature, which uses a camera to spot tiny bits of dirt. This is a great improvement over the previous version, which relied on a sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage technique to bounce around the room and clean at minimum three times from various angles.
The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on carpets and hard floors. Its score on low pile carpet was very good and it scored a good score on mid pile too. It did a fair job of picking up pet hair, but it had a difficult time with very long and thick pet fur that was clumped together.
Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our most efficient robots, and it's not even far from being as costly as the other top models on this list. It comes with many of the features you'd expect from a flagship model but does not have all the fancy apps or smart home integration that you'll get from other top contenders.
The iRobot Roomba can be set up quickly and is ready to use right away. After taking off vacuum mop cleaner robot and the battery pull tab from the 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 the job. It will automatically return to docking station when it is running out of battery or becomes full of trash. There are also indicator lights on top that indicate when the bin is empty, or when it needs to recharge, or when it loses its Wi-Fi.