About VacuBots

VacuBots covers robot vacuums, robotic lawn mowers and the technology behind them. Along with reviews and first looks, the site follows upcoming products, industry news and the government regulation increasingly shaping the robotics industry.

Our Goal

The goal behind VacuBots is simple. Share what is learned, explain what works and what does not, and give other robot owners useful information before they spend their money.

Editorial Policy

VacuBots is not sponsored by or affiliated with any robot manufacturer.

The site always discloses how products are obtained. Some are purchased directly, while others are provided as review samples or supplied through beta testing, early-access or other public testing programs.

However a product arrives, the opinions published on VacuBots are independent.

Some links on the site are affiliate links, which means VacuBots may earn a commission from qualifying purchases. That income helps offset some of the cost of operating the site and purchasing hardware for testing, but it is not a meaningful source of personal income for the editor and does not determine what receives a positive review.

How We Test

VacuBots takes a simple approach to reviews. We use the machines long enough to find out what they are actually like to own.

All reviews are based on at least 60 days (and sometimes up to 180 days) of use in the same house, across the same floors, furniture, rugs and thresholds.

More than one person in the household also uses the robots during that time. That helps uncover problems an experienced tester may learn to work around without even realizing it, while another person may run into the same issue immediately.

A week with a new robot can reveal plenty about cleaning performance, navigation and features. It probably will not reveal that a side brush fails around day 40, a filter gradually cakes with debris over time because it lacks a pre-screen or a firmware update suddenly makes mapping worse.

Those problems tend to show up only after the novelty wears off.

Our testing is also deliberately unglamorous. Pet hair and long human hair go under the brushes. Filters get dirty. Dust bins fill. Rugs move. Furniture gets bumped. Robots are sent back into rooms and situations where they have already struggled.

That is where maintenance, tangle resistance and reliability start to matter.

The site does not run standardized debris tests or assign robots comparative numerical scores.

What it does provide is a consistent environment. The same floors, rooms and household members test machine after machine.

When VacuBots says one robot handles carpet better than another, there is a good chance both of them cleaned the exact same carpet.