However, as with most robot vacuums, you could also set a Schedule to accomplish these tasks. You can connect the Roomba i4 EVO to your Wi-Fi so that you can use a smartphone app to tell it to start or stop, instruct it to return to its dock, or create a cleaning schedule, if you’d like, though doing so is totally optional. Since we first tested this model, iRobot has added smart mapping, which allows the i4 EVO to run through the house, shark robotic vacuums without cleaning, in order to create a single floor plan that is saved in the app. You can then label rooms and tell the vac to clean specific areas (or avoid ones that are particularly cluttered). We’ve concluded that the Roborock Q5’s smart mapping works better, but this new addition to the i4 EVO makes it slightly smarter than it was previously. Robot vacuums never get bored or distracted, and they don’t mind cleaning every day.
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Your robot vacuum will only clean your home as thoroughly as it’s capable of navigating it. The ideal cleaner will make easy work of finding its way from room to room and automatically avoiding obstacles along the way, all of which makes for proper, low-maintenance automated cleaning. These overhead long exposure shots each show the trail of a Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra as it cleans our test room. We attach glow sticks to the top of the cleaner directly above the vacuum intake to get a sense of how much coverage the vacuum offers and how intelligently it navigates. In this case, the S7 MaxV Ultra is as thorough and consistent as robot vacuums get. On top of that, the S9 Plus aced our pet hair pickup tests, where we scatter clumps of actual pet hair donated from a friendly local groomer across all of our test floors.
It left more rice and dust behind on the floor than the other two Roombas did, and it didn’t do well with pet hair at all, only picking up about half of the hair we spread across the carpet. You can also buy this robot vacuum without the self-emptying bin for $430. If you clean your house as I do, room by room, and don’t find using your hands to empty bins to be completely disgusting (as I do too, sadly), then it’s a fine way to save some cash. For several months, I found the Shark AI Ultra to be a reliable cleaning companion. And, of course, it also mops and empties itself, with a canister that can hold up to 60 days worth of gunk before you need to lift a finger.
Manual controls are also available, which isn’t something you see on a ton of robo-vacs. This option lets you control the machine almost like a slow and slightly clumsy RC car, giving you more control over where it cleans. It’s really up to you, but the advantage of a robot vacuum is that it can clean floors more often than many people are willing to vacuum. If you schedule it to run every few days, or even every day, dust and crumbs never have a chance to accumulate, leaving your floors feeling cleaner than they would without a bot. On that note, there is still a place in the world for cheaper robots that rely on semi-random navigation. (We like to call it bump-and-run navigation.) If you need to clean only a few rooms at a time (800 square feet is a comfortable upper limit), one of these models can get the job done.