The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

Robot vacuums remove pet hair, lint, and dust from the floor vacuum robot before they settle. They also can avoid stairs and other obstacles, including tippy furniture.

Most robotic vacs require some maintenance, like emptying (and occasionally rinsing) the bin and wiping sensors and cameras. Additionally, they must be connected to an electrical source. Many have smartphone apps to schedule, adjust settings and more.

Roomba 980 from iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980 is the most recent in the line of top-of-the-line robotic vacuum cleaners that are an essential part of any modern household. This model comes with a HEPA filter that can aid those suffering from allergies. On top of that, it also comes with a powerful battery which can clean for up to two hours, best robot Vacuum Under 200 and it will automatically return to its dock when its bin is full.

It also has a feature called smart mapping, which makes use of multiple sensors to help determine the areas in your home that need attention and make a tidy path around them. This technology is extremely effective at navigating around toys left on the floor, or furniture legs sticking out from under things. It also has a camera sensor that snaps the Roomba back to its original position when it starts to drift away from its original location.

iRobot has also included a set of rollers underneath the Roomba that don't have bristles and are therefore more likely to withstand the tangles that previous models. They're also a bit taller than previous rollers and can better fit under low couches and beds, and they're designed to help this model navigate more easily across different flooring types.

What sets the Roomba 980 apart from other high-end models however, is its incorporation of the latest dirt detection feature, which uses cameras to detect particles of dirt embedded. This is a great improvement over the previous version, which relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom cover method to bounce around a room and clean at minimum three times from various angles.

In our tests of its performance it was found that the Roomba 980 did well on carpets and hard flooring. It scored extremely well on carpets with a low pile, and on mid-pile. It did a good job collecting pet hair, but struggled with thick and long pet hair that was stuck together.

The Roomba 980 is still one of the best robot vacuum under 200 performing robots in our list despite the minor drawbacks. It's also not as expensive as other top-of-the-line models. It still has a lot of features we'd expect to see in a top-of-the-line model however it lacks all the fancy app-enabled functions or smart home integration that you'll find in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba is simple to set up and start working immediately. After taking off the yellow bin insert and battery pull tab from the undercarriage, you simply plug it into a wall socket or its Home Base docking stations, hit the "Clean button" and let it job. It will automatically return to its dock when the battery runs out or it's stuffed with debris, and it also has indicators at the top to indicate when its bin is full or it needs to be recharged, or its Wi-Fi signal is lost.