The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

best budget robot vacuum vacuums nab pet hair, dust and lint off floors before they can settle. They can also avoid stairs and other obstacles, including tippy furniture.

The majority of robotic vacuums require maintenance, such as emptying (and occasionally, rinsing) the bin and wiping sensors and cameras. They also need to be plugged in. Many come with smartphone apps to schedule, adjust settings, and more.

Roomba 960 by iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980, the most recent of a series of top-of-the-line robot vacuums, is an essential for any modern home. This model comes with a HEPA filter that can help those who are allergic. 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 once its bin is full.

It also comes with a feature called smart mapping which uses multiple sensors to help it identify the areas of your home that need attention and then create a clean path around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a good job of moving around toys that have been left scattered on the floor, or furniture legs that stick out from under the furniture. It also has a camera that can snap the Roomba back to its original position when it begins to drift away from its original location.

iRobot has also introduced a new set of rollers beneath the bottom of the Roomba that don't have bristles and therefore tend to resist tangles better than the previous models. These rollers are also taller and can be tucked under low couches or beds. They're designed to make the model more movable on various kinds of floors.

What makes the Roomba 980 stand out from other models of this class, though, is its integration of the new dirt detection feature, which uses a camera to spot particles of dirt embedded. This is a great improvement over the previous version, which relied on a 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 both hard flooring and carpets. It scored very well on carpets with low pile and on mid-pile. It did a good job of picking up pet hair, but it was struggling with extremely thick and long pet fur that was clumped together.

Despite these small shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our top-performing robots, robot vacuum and Robot Vacuum it's even nearly as expensive as the other top-of-the-line models in this list. It still has a lot of features we'd expect to see in a top-of-the-line model, but it doesn't have all the fancy app-enabled functions or smart home integration that are found in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and start up and running immediately. After you have removed the pull tab for the battery and yellow bin insert from undercarriage, all you have to do is plug it into its Home Base docking station or a wall socket, hit its large "Clean" button, and let it go to work. It will return to its dock when its battery runs out or it's full of debris, and it has indicator lights on the top of the device to indicate that its bin is full or it requires recharging or its Wi-Fi signal is lost.