The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

best robot vacuums vacuums nab pet hair, dust and lint off floors before they can settle. They also can avoid obstacles such as furniture that is tippy and stairs.

Most robotic vacs require some maintenance, such as emptying (and occasionally, rinsing) the bin and wiping sensors and cameras. Also, they have to be plugged into a power source. Many come with 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 best combo vacuum mop robot cleaners that are an essential part in any modern home. This model is equipped with a HEPA-filter that will aid those suffering from allergies. It also has a powerful battery which can be cleaned for up to two hours before returning to its dock automatically when the bin is full.

Smart mapping is another feature that assists in identifying areas of your home that require attention and provides an easy path to get around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does an excellent job of moving around toys that have been abandoned on the floor, or furniture legs that are sticking out from under the furniture. It also has a camera that can snap the Roomba back to the real world when it starts to drift away from its original location.

iRobot also added an additional set of rollers beneath the Roomba that do not have bristles which makes them more likely to withstand the tangles that previous models. These rollers are also taller and can fit under beds or couches that are low. They're specifically designed to make this model more adaptable to different kinds of floors.

What sets the Roomba 980 apart from other models of this class, though, is its inclusion of a new dirt detection feature that utilizes cameras to identify bits of embedded dirt. This is an improvement over the previous model that relied on a sensor-driven pseudorandom cover method to bounce around the room, and then clean the entire area three times at various angles.

The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on both carpets and hard floors. It scored very well on carpets with a low pile, and on mid-pile. It did a fair job of picking up pet hair, but it had a difficult time with very thick and long pet fur that was clumped together.

Despite these minor shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our best robot mop for vinyl floors vacuum Mop best combo robot vacuum mop robot (www.Insong.Kr)-performing robots, and isn't even far from being as costly as some of the other top-of-the-line models in this list. It still has a lot of features that we'd like to find in a flagship model, but it doesn't have all the fancy apps or smart home integration that are found in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba is simple to set up and get working immediately. After you have removed the pull tab for the battery and yellow bin insert from its undercarriage, all that you need to do is plug it into its Home Base docking station or a wall socket, press its big "Clean" button and let it get to work. It will return to its dock when the battery runs out or it's full of debris, and it also has indicators on the top to indicate when its bin is full or it needs to be recharged or if its Wi-Fi signal is not working.