The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
Robot vacuums sweep pet hair, lint, and dust from floors before it can settle. They also help avoid stairs and other obstacles, including tippy furniture.
Most robotic vacuums require regular maintenance. This includes emptying the bin (and sometimes, rinsing it) and wiping the cameras and sensors. They also require to be connected. A lot of them have apps for smartphones for scheduling, setting and more.
iRobot Roomba 980
The iRobot Roomba 980 is the latest in the series of top-of-the-line robot vacuum cleaners that are an essential part of any modern household. This model is incredibly powerful suction and a HEPA filter that can assist anyone suffering from allergies. It also has a powerful battery which can clean for two hours, and return to its dock automatically when the bin is full.
It also has a feature called smart mapping that uses multiple sensors to help suss out the best mop and vacuum robot areas in your home that need attention and make a tidy path around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a great job of maneuvering around toys that are placed on the floor, or furniture legs that are sticking out from under the furniture. It also has a camera that snaps 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 Roomba's bottom that do not have bristles, and thus tend to resist tangles more than previous models. These rollers are also taller and can be tucked under beds or couches with low sides. They're specifically designed to make this model more maneuverable on different flooring types.
The Roomba 980 differs from other high-end models by its new dirt detection feature, which uses cameras to identify dirt that has been embedded. This is a nice improvement over the previous version, that relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around a room and clean at least three times from different angles.
In our tests of its performance in our tests of its performance, the Roomba 980 did well on both hard flooring and carpets. Its score on the low pile carpet was impressive, and it scored a high score on mid pile too. It did a decent job of picking up pet hair, but it had a difficult time with very long and thick pet fur that was clumped together.
Despite these minor shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our most efficient robots, and it's not even close to being as expensive as some of the other top models on this list. It has many of the features we would expect from a flagship model, but it doesn't have all the fancy apps and smart home integrations you'll get from other top contenders.
The iRobot Roomba is easy to set up and get running right away. After taking off the yellow bin insert and battery pull tab from the undercarriage, you just plug it into the wall socket or one of its Home Base docking stations, press the "Clean button" and let it do its work. It will return to its dock when its battery is out or it's stuffed with debris. It also has indicator lights on the top of the device to indicate that its bin is full, it needs to be recharged, or its Wi-Fi signal is not working.