Robot Vacuums

How to read this table

Every value in the table above is the manufacturer's own published figure, copied from the maker's product page, spec sheet or manual. Robot vacuum marketing moves faster than robot vacuum spec sheets, so this table deliberately holds only what makers commit to in writing. A blank cell reads Not published, which means the figure was not stated — not that we could not be bothered to look, and not that the feature is absent.

Suction is the figure to treat most carefully. Pascal ratings are measured differently between brands and at different modes, so a higher number is not automatically more cleaning on your floor. Read it next to brush type, dustbin volume and whether the maker publishes a mopping function at all.

What actually decides which robot vacuum fits

Floor mix first. Hard floors reward mopping and edge brushes; deep pile carpet rewards a rubber roller and a maker who publishes carpet boost behaviour. If a house has both, the published detail that matters most is whether the unit lifts or avoids the mop on carpet, because that is the difference between mopping and dragging wet cloth across a rug.

Then the base station. A self-emptying dock changes how often you touch the machine, and its published dust bag capacity tells you roughly how many weeks between changes. Docks that wash and dry mop pads add water tanks and drying cycles; those are published specifications and they are also the parts that need routine cleaning themselves.

Navigation matters more in a cluttered home than raw suction does. Makers publish the sensing approach — lidar, structured light, camera, or bump-and-gyroscope — and whether mapping supports saved rooms and no-go zones. A machine that cannot store a map cannot be told to skip the cat bowl.

Runtime and recharge-and-resume decide whether one cycle finishes a large floor area. Where a maker publishes an area figure alongside runtime, treat it as an ideal-conditions number: obstacles and mopping both cut it.

For a shortlist, the data-ranked guide to the best robot vacuum orders models on published suction, battery runtime and dustbin volume, with vacuum-only and vacuum-and-mop models on the same page and mopping and self-emptying shown wherever the maker publishes them.

Prices and availability in this category

Robot vacuum list prices move constantly and discount deeply, so the price column here uses the manufacturer's published list price. Where a tracked price has changed, the row shows the latest change rather than quietly overwriting the old figure. Availability status is recorded on every unit, so a model that has been superseded is marked instead of sitting in the table looking current.