The iRobot Roomba 980 robot vacuum deals Vacuum Cleaner

Cheap Robot Vacuum vacuums nab pet hair, lint, and dust off floors before they can settle. They also help stay clear of stairs and other obstacles such as furniture that is tippy.

Most robotic vacuums require regular maintenance. This involves emptying the bin (and occasionally, rinsing it) and cleaning the cameras and sensors. They also need to be connected. A lot of them have apps for smartphones to schedule, adjust settings and more.

Roomba 960 from iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980, the most recent in a line of top robot vacuum-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. It also comes with an extremely powerful battery that can be cleaned for up to two hours before returning to its dock automatically when the bin is full.

It also comes with the feature of smart mapping which uses multiple sensors to identify the areas in your home that need attention and then create a clean route around them. This technology is very efficient in navigating around toys that have been left on the floor, or furniture legs sticking out from underneath things. It also has a camera sensor that can snap the Roomba back to its original position when it starts to drift away from its original location.

iRobot has also added a new set of rollers underneath the Roomba's bottom that don't have bristles and therefore tend to resist tangles better than earlier models. These are also a little higher than the older rollers and can better fit under beds and couches with low sides, and they're designed to allow this model to move more easily across a variety of floor types.

What makes the Roomba 980 stand out from other models of this class, though, is its incorporation of the latest dirt detection feature that uses cameras to identify tiny bits of dirt. This is a significant improvement over the previous model, which relied on the sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around a room and clean everything at minimum three times from various angles.

The Roomba 980 performed well in our tests on carpets and hard floors. Its score on low pile carpet was very good and it scored a good score on mid pile, too. It did a decent job of removing pet hair, but it had a difficult time with extremely thick and long pet fur that was clumped together.

Despite these slight limitations, the Roomba 980 remains one of our most efficient robots, and it's not even far from being as costly as the other top models on this list. It comes with many of the features you'd expect from a flagship model, but doesn't come with all the fancy apps or home integrations you'll see in other top models.

The iRobot Roomba is simple to set up and get running right away. After taking off the yellow bin insert and cheap robot vacuum pull tab from the undercarriage, you simply plug it into a wall socket or its Home Base docking stations, hit the "Clean button" and let it work. It will automatically return to its dock when its battery runs out or it's full of debris. It also has indicator lights on the top of the device to indicate that the bin is full, it's time to recharge or if its Wi-Fi signal is lost.