Introduction

Before you spend £500 buying a robot vacuum cleaner and set it on top of a high-end heap, it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s making it stand out online. There are lots of proprietary devices that let you do everything from control settings and vacuum settings, to even share cleaning instructions and a tell-tale “click” symbol. But are they worth the investment? Is that particular feature a good indicator of how many devices you’ll be using in your home?

How easy is the robot to use?

Rideability – while it takes a long time for an iRobot to get your floors in a good pile, there’s still a lot to learn by trial and error and you should probably invest in an app before you add a robot. If you just want to throw everything together, using your smartphone and mouse is great, but we do recommend starting with a basic app for navigation. Not sure how you need to start? Use our robot vacuum review to see which is our top pick for 2018.

Other kirby functions

In addition to the mop function that comes with your iRobot Roomba, several other ones like the DaVinci Flex R85 are available at Amazon. These include the Self Clean mode, which eliminates the need to clean out dust bunnies, pet hair and pets’ pooches when you’re doing the regular clean up. They also use 0.3-megawatt quad-core processors from Kuka to automatically redirect dust spatters to targeted areas. You can click your mouse on each of these devices to control the Vacuum with virtual buttons in the app itself, but we found that activating the voice assistant was more convenient. All the devices carried the same capabilities: they could map information and create virtual maps and were easy to use.

Lack of smart navigation features

One major drawback of a robot vacuum is the fact that it can’t map your home just like a smart home device will, meaning it cannot work with Alexa, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa as it could with smart lockers. The main reason for this could be the holes and limitations in these tools. You don’t really want to rely on your robot to learn your address and local rules just to vacuum your house. For this you’re better looking for an app that lets you monitor your spaces. These apps can help automate the whole process by letting you see exactly how many times each robot mop got stuck and will let you know how to build a Go-to route out of them if that doesn’t help you keep your floors clear of debris. If your screen isn’t always displaying clean, skip-clean zones, this app would also be useful for helping you keep an eye on robots. In our own tests, feature-wise the only two things that didn’t make a vast difference were not having maps and not being built in, as well as the map of the view and being able to navigate manually using the Auto Mopping feature. You can switch between 100 different cleaning modes if you prefer on a schedule.

Bottom line

Even if you have a big house, you’ll be paying a premium to clean it. Whether or not a robot vacuum is worth the investment is one of the big questions that keep people from buying one. However, there are robots out there and they’re unbelievably smart that use advanced sensors to provide accurate recommendations to help clean your home. Some robots, particularly the Eufy RoboVac 11s and Neato Botvac Roomba i3, are such capable cleaners that even pet owners won’t want to part with them.