The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot vacuum & mop in one Cleaner

best inexpensive robot vacuum vacuums eliminate pet hair, lint, and dust from the floor before they settle. They can also stay clear of obstacles like furniture that is tippy and staircases.

Most robotic vacuums require maintenance. This involves emptying the bin (and occasionally, Vacuum & mop in One rinsing it) and wiping the sensors and cameras. Also, they need to be plugged into an electrical source. A lot of them have apps for smartphones to schedule, adjust settings, and more.

Roomba 980 from iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980, the most recent in a line of top-of-the-line robot vacuums, is an essential for any modern home. This model is incredibly powerful suction and an HEPA filter vacuum that mops and vacuums will help anyone concerned about allergies. On top of that it also comes with a powerful battery which can clean for up to two hours and it will automatically return to its dock when its bin is full.

It also comes with a feature called smart mapping which uses multiple sensors to identify the areas of your home that require attention and create a cleaning path around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a great job of moving around toys that have been placed on the floor or furniture legs that stick out of the ground. Roomba also has a sensor that snaps Roomba to its real-world location if it begins to move away from its initial location.

iRobot has also added a new set of rollers underneath the bottom of the Roomba that do not have bristles, and thus tend to be more resistant to tangles than the previous models. These rollers are also taller and can fit under beds or couches with low sides. They're designed to make this model more adaptable to different floor types.

The Roomba 980 stands out from other models with a high-end price tag by its brand new dirt detection feature that makes use of cameras to detect embedded dirt. This is a significant improvement over the previous model, which relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around the room and clean at minimum three times from various angles.

The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on both carpets and hard floors. It scored highly on low-pile carpet and also on mid-pile. It did a fair job of removing pet hair, but it struggled 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 nearly as expensive as the other top-of-the-line models on this list. It has many of the features we would expect from a top model but does not have all the fancy apps or home integration you'd see in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba can be set up in a matter of minutes and is available for use as soon as you are ready to. After removing the pull tab for the battery and yellow bin insert from undercarriage, all that you need to connect it to its Home Base docking station or an outlet on the wall, press its large "Clean" button, and let it go to work. It will automatically return to its dock when it is running out of battery or is full of trash. There are also indicator lights at the top of the bin that let you know when the bin is empty, or when it needs to recharge, or when it loses Wi-Fi.