The Dyson 360 vis nav stands out for its unique features and powerful cleaning performance despite some limitations and its high price. It’s on the heavy side but compensates with extremely strong suction, effectively picking up pet hair and embedded dirt. Instead of a conventional side brush, it uses an extending side duct to tackle edges and corners. It also has a large brush roll that spans the full size of the vacuum for effective cleaning, and though its dustbin is relatively small, it’s equipped with a convenient one-touch ejection system for easy emptying.

It can also offer alternative cleaning patterns, so you can choose the route you want it to take. At 4.75 inches, it's taller than many other robot vacuums — it could just reach under our kitchen baseboards, but failed to get under the dishwasher, which the majority of others models could clear.

Send it out several times a week, and it’ll nab all the dust and pet hair, lint and surface dirt on your floors before it has a chance to build up or get ground in.

The j7+ comes with a cleaning base which is hard to fault. It can hold up to 60 days of debris and looks easy on the eye compared to other bases — plus it’s more compact too.

This is then stored in the dock until this larger bin is full and needs emptying, which you will need to do, usually once a month or less, depending on how often your robot vacuum cleans.

The list of reputable brands making high-quality robot vacuums doesn’t stretch long, but CR evaluates all of the mainstays, which run the spectrum between inexpensive and luxury.

The app is easy to use and functions well. Our reviewer was also very impressed with the mapping – the X10 accurately mapped their apartment on its first exploratory outing – as well as the navigation and obstacle avoidance.

AR Score is a scoring system developed by our experts. The score is from 0 to 10 based on the data collected by the Appliances Radar tool. This score doesn't impact from any manufacturer or sales agent websites. Learn more

We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

The dustbin in the base is easy to remove and empty, and the filters in both the robot and the dock are washable — though only the base filter is HEPA-certified.

For an even more automated approach to cleaning, look for a robot with a scheduled cleaning mode. After you set up the day and time you want to have a room cleaned, the robot will automatically get started on the task while you’re in bed or at work.

The Roborock Q Revo vacuums and wet-mops simultaneously, using circular pads that spin at an impressive 200 rotations per minute. We found this high-speed scrubbing ensures floors are thoroughly cleaned, lifting dirt and debris effectively.

The Narwal Freo X Ultra is the best robot vacuum for carpet. It's a premium product, (and it's not available in the UK), but delivers the best carpet cleaning performance of any robovac we've tested. On test we found Top 3 Automatic Vacuum Cleaners that not only did it suck up finer dust and dirt efficiently, it also scooped up larger debris – namely bits of cereal – just as well.

Over the past 10 years, we've tested dozens of robot vacuums, both by performing objective tests as well as real-world setups. Each model we review is first evaluated to see how well it can pick up three types of debris. We measure out 20 grams of Cheerios, 20 grams of kitty litter, and 20 grams of pet hair. Next, we scatter each individually across a hardwood floor, and then weigh the contents of the robot vacuum's dustbin to see how much of each it picked up. We then repeat the same three tests on a low-pile carpet. Afterwards, the robot vacuum receives a cleaning performance score, which is the percentage of debris it was able to collect. After we record each robot vacuum's scores, we let these machines loose in our tester’s home to see how each holds up in terms of navigation, obstacle avoidance, and coverage in real-world testing.