The iRobot Roomba 980 dyson robot vacuum Vacuum Cleaner

Robot vacuums remove pet hair, best Robot vacuum And mop combo lint, and dust from floors before they settle. They can also stay clear of 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. They also need to be plugged in. A lot of them have apps for smartphones for scheduling, setting up settings and more.

Roomba 980 from iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980 is the most recent in the series of top-of-the-line robot vacuum cleaners that are an essential part of every modern household. This model is equipped with a HEPA-filter that will assist those who suffer from allergies. It also comes with an extremely powerful battery that can clean for two hours and returns to its dock automatically when the bin is full.

Smart mapping is another feature that helps it identify areas of your home that require attention, and then creates a path for cleaning around them. This technology is very effective in navigating toys left on the floor, or furniture legs sticking out from underneath objects. It also has a camera that snaps the Roomba back to reality when it starts drifting away from its original location.

iRobot has also added a new set of rollers underneath the Roomba's bottom that don't have bristles and therefore tend to resist tangles more than the previous models. These rollers are also taller and can be placed under beds or couches with low sides. They're designed to make this model more movable on various floor types.

What sets the Roomba 980 apart from other high-end models, though, is its inclusion of a new dirt detection feature that utilizes cameras to detect tiny bits of dirt. This is a great improvement over the previous version, which relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage technique to bounce around the room and clean at least three times from different angles.

The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on both carpets and hard floors. It scored highly on carpets with 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.

Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our best robot vacuum and mop combo-performing 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 you'd expect from a flagship model but does not have all the fancy apps or home integration that you'll see in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and get running right away. After taking the yellow bin insert and battery pull tab from the undercarriage, you just 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 the dock when it is running out of battery or is full of trash. There are also indicator lights on top that show when the bin is empty, or when it requires recharging, or if it loses Wi-Fi.