The best Robot Vacuum of 2024

Each robot vacuum we process for recommendation is put through its paces in our testing lab in Louisville, Kentucky. In addition to the test floors where we conduct our controlled intake tests, we monitor the vacuum of each robot in a special test room filled with fake furniture to measure how well it navigates through common obstacles. Beyond that, we test each robot’s ability to cover pet hair without clumping or leaving loose strands behind, consider extraction capabilities, and test to see how well it can navigate fake dog messes.

Let’s dive deeper into the big ideas, starting with our performance test.

The power of taking a robot vacuum

When it comes to sweeping performance, we want to know how each robot performs against common debris and other debris, and how it performs against very small particles such as dust, dirt and sand. To find out, we use dry, uncooked black rice as a grounding agent and sand as an analog for fine particles.

In each case, we spread a controlled amount on three test floors: low-pile carpet, medium-pile carpet and hardwood floors. Then, we take the robot vacuum, thoroughly empty its dust bin, send it to clean the affected area and finally measure the weight of anything it can pick up. That gives us a percentage of the full download. From there, we repeat each run two times and average the results.

Speaking of results, the graph above shows you how each cleaner we’ve tested over the past few years stacks up on hardwood floors. The iRobot Roomba Combo J7 Plus is our most tested cleaner in the area, picking up an average of 98% of crumbs and an impressive 100% of sand. Behind it is our top recommendation, the Dremetech DreameBot D10 Plus, which came in second place on the hardwood floors despite selling for less than half as much as the Roomba Combo J7 Plus that just finished at the top.

Next is a low pile carpet. Along with the fact that the orange irons are very short (sand cleaning is more of a challenge on carpets than on hardwood floors because of all the fibers the sand can cling to), note that the order of the cleaners is different, with our upper midrange. choose, Roborock S8, now the best. Different robotics spaces will have different strengths and weaknesses based on their designs, so our diverse testing helps us make the most informed and well-rounded recommendations possible.

Finally, our midpile carpet results. Neato cleaned up in this test, with the Neato D9 leading all of our CNET-tested cleaners overall and the less expensive Neato D8 coming in third overall. Among them is the Robot Roomba Combo J7 Plus in second place. As an examination of the lower pile, notice that most of the cleaners in the upper part of the graph are all very close to each other — it’s not until you get to the bottom of the pack that those bars start to shrink. . That’s good for you as a consumer, because it means you have a good variety of robot vacuums to choose from that all offer comparable cleaning power at all different price points.

Another reminder: These graphs cover the robot vacuums we’ve tested over the past few years. The robot vacuums we tested prior to that time used a different test setup, so the data from those tests cannot be directly compared. I made sure to point out past performers that are still good buys, especially the iRobot Roomba S9 Plus, which performed exceptionally well on medium-sized carpets and remains one of our top recommendations.

Robot vacuum navigation capabilities

Your robot vacuum will only clean your home as much as it can navigate. An ideal cleaner will make easy work of finding its way from one room to another and automatically avoid obstacles in the way, all of which makes for a convenient, low-maintenance automated cleaning.

We make sure to look at each robot vacuum as it cleans to get an idea of ​​how well it’s doing but to get the best comparison from cleaner to cleaner, we take long exposure photos of each as it cleans our dark test room, light sticks attached to the top of each directly above the vacuum . The resulting images show us simple paths that reveal the path of the robot as it moves around the room and cleans our fake furniture.

Now, compare that to the following GIF, which shows three runs from our top pick, the iRobot Roomba Combo J7 Plus. Do you see the difference? The Roomba wasn’t very effective at covering the entire room, missing the bottom left corner on two out of three runs, and it had a lot of difficulty providing adequate protection for the legs of that ridiculous dining table, too.

In large part, it comes down to the technology at play. Over the years, we have consistently noticed that robotic spaces using laser-guided lidar navigation are often very good at mapping their location and their paths. Meanwhile, 3D-mapping cameras with object recognition can give robotic vacuums more ability to identify and adapt to obstacles in their path. The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra uses both technologies, which helps explain why it works so well here. Meanwhile, the Roomba relies on cameras and sensors alone, with lasers left out of the mix.

Still, those cameras certainly help. Just watch the GIF above, which shows what happened when we tested the iRobot Roomba J7 Plus — specifically, its promise to identify and avoid pet waste. With a variety of (I assure you, fake) dog feces scattered around the small, enclosed test area, the Roomba did its best to sweep the area without touching any of it. It passed, it didn’t meet any of our obnoxious looking tests.

Now, compare that to the Samsung JetBot AI Plus, which also promises to use its cameras to spot and avoid falling animals. The effect was not great; for each test, it will eventually collide with our test stack. Thankfully they weren’t really.