The i3 has an attractive woven plastic gray top — a nice change from most of the shiny black plastic you find in this category (a magnet for dust, fingerprints, and scratches). It still gets stuck on common robot traps such as phone charging cables, cat toys, and in my house, the skinny feet of a lounger chair. You do need to tidy up a bit before you set it free, but it does better with large cables and rug tassels than many other robots. (iRobot has anti-tangle tech that makes the bot reverse course if it starts to get tangled.) This works pretty well for bigger items but, sadly, not phone charging cords. For several hundred dollars less than the j7, the i3 has similar software features, the same suction level, and a slightly smaller battery.
We measured the decibel rating of each vacuum we tested, and the quietest option was the Samsung Jet Bot AI+ Robot Vacuum Cleaner, which was only 68 decibels. The object avoidance technology was also impressive; when we tried it at home, we noticed how well it avoided walls and table legs due to the sensor, even rerouting around the dog on its way back to the charging base. It does a great job of picking up dog hair and dust, as well as chunkier debris (we even noticed a few screws in the dustbin). If you have a large home, a complex layout, or you only want your robot vacuum to clean certain rooms at a time, you’ll likely find that vacuums with mapping technology are the best to use. We found that the Ecovacs DeeBot T9+ Vacuum and Mop Combo was the best robot vacuum with mapping, as it easily navigated around obstacles during our real-world tests. After completing a cleaning job, this robot vacuum will automatically empty everything it picked up into the dispenser, so you’ll never have to come in contact with the grime from your floors.
It’s really up to you, but the advantage of a robot vacuum is that it can clean floors more often than many people are willing to vacuum. If you schedule it to run every few days, or even every day, dust and crumbs never have a chance to accumulate, leaving your floors feeling cleaner than they would without a bot. In most homes, a bot is likely to stay in good shape if you do about 15 minutes of maintenance per month, maybe a bit more if the bot has a heavy workload. In December 2022, an MIT Technology Review article revealed that images captured by cameras on development models of iRobot Roomba vacuums were leaked publicly by a third-party company, Scale AI, with whom iRobot had shared the data. Another surprisingly useful upside to the basic Eufy bots is their short body. At 2.85 inches, the 11S is almost a full inch shorter than the Roomba 694, enough for it to glide under even lower-clearance furniture, where dust and hair build up but never see the light of day.
But it didn’t recognize (or at least didn’t try to avoid) our other obstacles, including toys, a sock, a shoe, and a water bowl. We like this bot for a lot of other important reasons (expected durability, cleaning power, smart navigation), and the obstacle recognition is almost like a toss-in feature, so it isn’t a bad buy. The company has a good history of following through on those kinds of promises, but you should expect the improvements to trickle out over several years, not months. We’ve tested a handful of its laser-nav bots over the past few years, including the Deebot Ozmo T8 AIVI (a higher-end but otherwise similar version of the N8 and N8 Pro). All of the Ecovacs models we’ve tested worked fine when they were new, but you can usually find a better bot for a lower price.
But if you want to program it to turn on every Sunday at 10 a.m., learn how to stop at the top of the stairs, or do any other “tricks,” you’ll want to make sure you choose a robot vacuum that’s loaded with the features you want. shark cordless Some of our favorite features were smart mapping and the ability to set cleaning schedules from an app. To test the maneuverability of each model, we set up an area with a medium-pile rug, couch, coffee table, and dining table.