With technology progressing rapidly in recent years, the humble robot vacuum cleaner is now the best way to keep your house clean with minimal effort. You no longer need to push a heavy vacuum around your home to keep your floors in pristine condition.
Crucially, robot vacuum cleaners are no longer the expensive pieces of home cleaning tech they used to be. You can now pick up a reliable robot vacuum cleaner for less than £200, although there are still some high-priced options to choose from if you prefer a robot vacuum cleaner with all the bells and whistles. If you’re after an easy and effort-free way to keep your floors clean, buying one of these robotic helpers could be one of the best investments you ever make. Humidifier For Big Room
Thanks to the use of built-in cameras and a variety of sensors, robot vacuum cleaners will find their way around your home with minimal fuss – and the more expensive models come with different cleaning modes and advanced features such as the ability to produce maps of where they've cleaned and for how long.
However, with such a wide variety of models to choose from – at varying prices – it can be tricky to choose which robot vacuum cleaner suits your needs and budget. Here at Expert Reviews, we’ve tested all the latest models, to prevent any guesswork on your part when you buy. These are the only robot vacuum cleaners you need to consider buying in 2022.
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With room mapping and more powerful cleaning than Eufy's more affordable 15C Max model, the Eufy Robovac G30 Edge is an excellent mid-range robot vacuum cleaner. Now that you can get it for just £200 it's available at its lowest-ever price. Amazon Was £320 Now £200 Buy Now
All robot vacuums employ bumpers and sensors to help them navigate their way around your home and to prevent them coming to grief by falling down the stairs. But some are more efficient at finding their way around than others.
The cheaper versions run to a random cleaning pattern and bump around your rooms blindly, cleaning as they go. This works up to a point but it can take a while for these types of vacuum to finish cleaning a room and, although they do their best to cover all the floor, they often miss spots here and there.
The more expensive robots employ cameras and advanced laser sensors to map out their surroundings first before tackling each room. This means they can work out the most efficient route before getting started and don’t need to cover the same spot twice, as can happen with robot without these sensors.
Even then, advanced sensors can only go so far. A big problem with robot vacuums is that, no matter how good they are at mapping out their surroundings, they often get beached on low-lying furniture and stuck on stray cables.
The best way to avoid this is to keep your floors clear of such items, but in some cases that isn’t possible, which is where you want a robot that comes with the ability to set virtual no-go zones in the accompanying app. That way you can instruct your robot to avoid the places you don’t want it to go near.
Although most robot vacuums look the same from the outside, they deliver vastly different levels of cleaning performance. And this is affected by a number of different factors. Probably the most important aspect is brush configuration.
Our favourite robot vacuums have brushes that span the full width of the unit, allowing them to clean right along the edges of your room and into the corners. Alas, these aren’t particularly common and most stick with the popular disc-shape, with the main brush situated between the wheels and a couple of less effective spinning brushes in the “corners” of the vacuum to drag dust into the mouth of the vacuum.
Next, you need to consider suction power. Typically expressed in Pa (pascals), this is a measurement of how powerful the motor is inside a robot vacuum. A good number to look for here is around 2,000Pa or above for an effective clean.
We test each robot vacuum cleaner by installing it in a typical domestic setting. The charging station is always placed in the same location, and the robot is given the same basic floorplan to clean, so we can see how elements such as navigation and speed compare between every robot we review. It’s a challenging floor plan that challenges even the smartest robot, with plenty of corners, tight spots, low furniture, surface changes and cable nests.
During testing each robot is connected to Wi-Fi and controlled through the supplied app, where available. We test all the features and functions available, including navigation to a second storey, to ensure robots can handle switching between multiple maps. If a robot has a self-emptying station or comes with a mop attachment, we test those too.
When it comes to analysing a robot’s cleaning capabilities, we test each robot using measured spillages of rice and flour. We send the robot to perform a spot clean of each spill on both carpet and hard floor, and measure the amount collected each time. This indicates how effective each robot is at gathering these problematic materials, and allows us to compare the results with every robot vacuum cleaner we’ve ever tested.
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Price: £250 | Buy now from Amazon
You might not have heard of Eufy, but don’t let that put you off: this superb RoboVac 15C Max is a solid choice if you’ve got £250 to spend.
The Eufy RoboVac 15C Max is the more fully featured version of our previous budget robot vacuum top pick, the RoboVac 30C. It costs a little more more – the RoboVac 30C has dropped in price since launch – but the 15C Max provides much more suction power than its predecessors. With 2,000Pa of suction, the 15C Max is very powerful considering its price but despite the extra power, it’s still impressively quiet regardless of which of the three settings you use (t has three cleaning settings: Standard, Boost IQ and Max).
Carpet areas will benefit from some of the more powerful settings, but we found the standard setting to be more than suitable for easy-cleaning hard flooring. Boost IQ adjusts the suction power automatically as the vacuum cleaner transitions between different types of flooring. The RoboVac 15C Max can also run up to 1hr 40mins on a single charge and is compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant for a fully hands-off approach to your daily cleaning.
It isn’t quite as feature-rich as some of the other robot vacuum cleaners on this list – it lacks infrared scanning and room-mapping – but at well under £300, the RoboVac 15C Max barely places a foot wrong and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything better at this price.
Read our full Eufy RoboVac 15C review for more details
Key specs – Size: 325 x 325 x 72mm; Weight: 2.7kg; Battery life: 1hr 40mins; Charge time: 2-3hrs; Bin capacity: 0.7l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55dB
Price: £554 | Buy now from Amazon
The AEG RX9.2 is unique among robot vacuum cleaners because it breaks free from the standard hockey puck circular design with a more triangular shape. It’s a stroke of genius, because it lets the corner brush reach all the way into the corners – an operation that is hampered by the curved edges of circular robots.
It uses a camera and lasers mounted on its front edge to weave its way around your furniture, carefully stopping in front of table and chair legs, and moving around them with minimal contact. This makes it a bit slower than robots with a more aggressive attitude to obstacles but your tables and chairs – and pets – will thank you for it.
The robot is controlled by an app, and we found its initial mapping a little fiddly to complete but we got there in the end. Once it’s all set up, however, the RX9.2 proved to be one of the best-performing robot vacuum cleaners we’ve tested to date.
Read our full AEG RX9.2 review for more details
Key specs – Size: 320 x 270 x 85mm; Weight: 2.5kg; Battery life: 40mins; Charge time: 2.5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.7l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 75dB
Price: £450 | Buy now from Amazon
A good robot vacuum cleaner needs to be a good all-rounder: effective at picking dust and dirt off your floor but also supported by solid navigation and a good app. The Eufy RoboVac X8 lines up all these elements. It isn’t the best cleaner we’ve ever seen in terms of dealing with serious mess in a spot clean but it is a solid general cleaner, has a brilliant app and is excellent at mapping, which makes it easy to configure and use.
Its cameras and lasers build up a detailed map of your floor as it performs its initial clean. This is then saved by the smartphone app, so you can send the X8 to clean individual rooms and set virtual boundaries to cordon-off no-go areas. This simple and intuitive operation, accompanying an affordable and capable robot, makes for a compelling package that’s excellent value for money.
Read our full Eufy RoboVac X8 review for more details
Key specs – Size: 345 x 345 x 98mm; Weight: 3.5kg; Battery life: Three hours; Charge time: 4-5 hours; Bin capacity: 0.6l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 75dB
Price: £899 l Buy now from John Lewis
With twice the suction power of any other robot vacuum cleaner we’ve tested, the Dyson 360 Heurist may be the priciest vacuum on this list, but it’s the only one with a genuine claim to being the only one that could replace your standard upright cleaner. With the Heurist, Dyson has not only improved suction by a claimed 20% but has also introduced an LED lighting ring so the robot can navigate in dark rooms and developed an improved app that gives more control over the robot.
The design hasn’t changed much between generations; it’s still around the same size and shape as the previous model – the 360 Eye – and it even uses the same digital motor as before. Instead, the new Dyson 360 Heurist builds on the things that set Dyson’s last robot apart from the competition – tank tracks for climbing obstacles, a full-width brush bar for close-to-the-edge cleaning and a 360-degree camera for all-around vision. If you want a robot vacuum cleaner with all the perks, look no further.
Read our full Dyson 360 Heurist review for more details
Key specs – Size: 2.3 x 2.4 x 12cm; Weight: 2.51kg; Battery life: 75mins; Charge time: 2.5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.5l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes
Price: £220 | Buy now from Amazon
The RoboVac 30C is another solid robot vacuum cleaner for the budget-conscious. It’s circular in shape and has a low profile so it can fit under furniture and clean the carpet under your bed, and it will recharge itself at its base when it runs low on battery power. With up to 100 minutes of cleaning per charge, though, it should be able to cope with even the largest of rooms before having to do that.
Other features include Alexa and Google Assistant support (so you can tell it to go clean via your Echo or Google Home speakers), a companion app so you can control it via your smartphone and a useful remote control that lets you direct operations when your phone isn’t handy.
With 1,500Pa of suction power, the Eufy RoboVac is pretty powerful for the money, and it’s reasonably quiet, too. If you’re looking to dip your toe in the water of automatic vacuum cleaning but don’t want to spend in the region of £500, this is the next best thing.
Read our full Eufy RoboVac 30C review for more details
Key specs – Size: 32.5 x 32.5 x 7.2cm; Weight: 2.7kg; Battery life: 1hr 40mins; Charge time: 3hrs; Bin capacity: 0.6l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55
Price: £400 | Buy now from Amazon
Before you splash out £400 on a robot vacuum cleaner, there’s a laundry list of features you’ll want to tick off. Laser scanning is the priority, allowing the vacuum to map out its surroundings before proceeding to clean, methodical cleaning is another and room mapping with virtual no-go zones is essential. The Ecovacs Deebot Ozmo 920 has all of these things and doesn't cost the earth (relatively speaking).
It also includes a mopping function with a sizeable 240ml water tank and even allows you to adjust how much water is used remotely via the app. There’s automatic surface detection, so it can ramp up the suction power when travelling from hard floor to carpeted areas, and a large battery gives up to 1hr 50mins of cleaning per charge.
In our testing, we found it cleaned effectively and efficiently, without getting stuck in the usual places, and it’s pretty quiet, too. It’s a great all-rounder and, although suction and cleaning power can’t match the Dyson 360 Heurist, it is quicker and a lot cheaper.
Key specs – Size: 350 x 350 x 93mm; Weight: 2kg; Battery life: 1hr 50mins; Charge time: 4hrs; Bin capacity: 0.43l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 66dB
Price: £700 | Buy now from Amazon
One of the annoying things about robot vacuum cleaners is that you generally have to tidy up before you set them off. Encounters with charging cables, stray socks or, if you’re really unfortunate, pet poo, can cause them to get stuck or make more mess than they clean up. There’s not much point in setting an automatic schedule for your robot to clean if you’re prone to leaving stuff on the floor.
However, you don’t need to worry about such things with the iRobot Roomba j7. It isn’t going to tidy away your mess but it will give a wide berth to obstacles that could cause it problems. It still gets nice and close to furniture but won’t be phased by the odd dropped sock.
It’s also a proficient cleaner, with a two-roller system that does a good job of scooping up dirt and dust while avoiding hair tangles. If you want a robot that also empties itself, check out the Roomba j7+, which is the same robot but comes with a charging station that empties the collection bin after every clean.
Key specs – Size: 340 x 340 x 92mm; Weight: 3.3kg; Battery life: 1hr 15mins; Charge time: 2hrs; Bin capacity: 0.25l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55dB
Price: £499 | Buy now from Amazon
There aren’t many robot vacuum cleaners that offer as many features as the Proscenic M8 Pro. It has the ability to both vacuum and mop your floor and it can empty itself into its self-emptying recharging station as well. Even more impressive is its price, which is several hundred pounds less than most other models that come with similar capabilities.
The M8 Pro navigates using LiDAR, so builds an accurate map of an area as it goes. This is fed into the smartphone app and can be used to control where the robot cleans and where it should avoid. It’s worth noting, however, that it can only save one map at a time, making it a bit of a pain to use on more than one storey of a household with multiple floors.
Key specs – Size: 350 x 350 x 98mm; Weight: 6.7kg; Battery life: 4hrs 10mins; Charge time: 4-6hrs; Bin capacity: 0.28l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 68dB
Price: £1,499 | Buy now from Amazon The Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni is arguably the best performing combination robot vacuum cleaner and mop we’ve tested, but its talents come at a price. One of these is its size. While the robot itself is a fairly standard configuration, its base station is enormous, measuring 448 x 430 x 578mm (WDH).
There’s a good reason for it, though. Not only does the station charge the robot and empty its collection bin into a bigger and easier to empty vacuum bag, it also fills the mop cartridge with clean water, and washes the mop pads when the robot has finished its work.
Although it’s a good vacuum cleaner, it’s the mopping action that impressed us most. The robot uses two circular mop pads that rotate at 180rpm, which gives the mop more cleaning power than rival robots, most of which simply wipe the floor as they pass.
The Omni X1 might be expensive, but it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a proper cleaner that can really do a good job. Keep an eye out for discounts and vouchers on Amazon, because Ecovacs regularly offers both.
Read our full Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni review for more details
Key specs – Size: 362 x 362 x 104mm; Weight: 4.4kg; Battery life: 260mins; Charge time: 6.5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.4l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 67dB
Price: £399 | Buy now from Amazon
If you want the absolute best price on a robot vacuum cleaner without compromising features, the Airrobo T10 Plus is a steal. Costing less than you might expect, this robot vacuum cleaner comes with its own self-emptying system and mop attachment, and it pretty much has everything you could possibly need.
There are few flaws with the robot itself, which vacuums well and neatly empties itself when it’s finished, but the mopping function is a bit basic. It’s the equivalent of dragging a damp cloth across the floor, but this is still something that’s acceptable for the price.
The bundled app isn’t the best we’ve seen, either, but again, these shortcomings are niggles rather than serious problems.
Read our full Airrobo T10 Plus review for more details
Key specs – Size: 352 x 348 x 98mm; Weight: 7.75kg; Battery life: N/S; Charge time: N/S; Bin capacity: 3.3l (bag); Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: N/S
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