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Roomba I7+ From IRobot Proves Its Smarts - Forbes

I've always wondered whether robot vacuum cleaners were worth having. Specifically, how do they work, and second are they effective? As in, do they do the job they are meant to do?

I started this robot cleaner journey with iRobot, the company that introduced the first such device way back in 2002. The unit I've started with is the Roomba i7+. This isn't the latest model in its range, with the J7+ and S9+ sitting above it with some additional features, but the i7+ is still advanced, as reflected in its £800 retail price tag though it's available for even less in some places. The "+" in the name refers to the automatic dirt disposal feature, but you can pick up an i7 without it for less. However, I would highly recommend the dirt disposal feature for reasons explained below, so I'd look to stretch to the + version if you can.

The iRobot Roomba i7+ incudes a dirt disposal system for less frequent bin emptying.

BHE

Getting around

The whole point of a robot cleaner is that it cleans your floors by itself so how it goes about doing this is important to understand. From a navigation perspective, there are three options. The original automated vacuums were "dumb" in that they used random navigation to bump their way around your home. Since then, two different types of navigation technologies have been introduced.

One is light detection and ranging technology or lidar, which bounces light off surfaces to build up a picture of its surroundings. The advantage of lidar is that it's quicker to build up a map and does not need light, so your robot can map and clean in the dark. The other technique uses a camera in combination with a technique called localization and mapping and is known as vSLAM. Here, the cleaner orientates and maps its surrounding using a single 3D vision camera.

iRobot uses vSLAM to map your cleaming area

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There is an ongoing debate over which is better. IRobot sticks with vSLAM and as it's used on Mars landers, so it should be good enough for your robot cleaner.

The Roomba rolls around the house until its battery runs out and will return to its base station automatically when it's low on power, before recharging and resuming. Initial placement took some thought as the base station needs to be set up with half a meter clearance on either side of it and also needs height clearance for the dirt disposal unit so I couldn't set it up out of the way under a table.

Name your space

Once placed you download the app and use it to connect the device to your Wi-Fi. You then have the fun task of coming up with a name for your robot, which is useful for voice control. After much thought, I shamelessly stole a name that a friend's daughter came up with for their robot vacuum – ladies and gentlemen, meet Csweepio.

For its first few Csweepio built up a map, which Roomba calls Imprint Smart Mapping. This takes some time, (obviously the larger your area, the longer it takes) and it can take several cleaning runs until it built up a full picture. IRobot says that you can speed things up by sending it out on mapping runs only, without cleaning, but I was happy for it to take its time and do both. While lidar powered units are reportedly quicker at this stage, unless you move home every week I can't see how that matters in the long term, as, once it's done, it's done.

During the learning process, it was amusing to see the robot move around the room and bump into things – it looked like watching R2D2 after drinking too much engine oil.

After a few goes round, the app will tell you that the device has learned the space. It will automatically divide up the rooms as it sees them, and I was impressed by how good a job it did at this. You can go into the app and adjust each of the dividing lines and give each room a name. This is important as once the mapping is complete you can send the robot out to just clean one room by name, either by using the app or, by voice. It does feel futuristic to ask Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri for your robot to go clean a room and see it move off its power perch and set off to clean.

The i7+ can also remember up to 10-floor plans, so if you wish, you can use it on both, or indeed, all 10 floors of your house.

A great thing I can see from Roomba is that it offers improvements to its app over time. One new feature that has been introduced since the i7+ came out is the ability to set areas that the robot shouldn't go into, such as your pet's food and drink bowls. Csweepio knocked over my cat's water bowl twice before I realised I could do this, so it's a feature I'm now grateful for.

The Roomba software maps your cleaning area and can update itself after detecting any changes.

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Naturally, the cat-eyed the new entrant with considerable suspicion but has now got used to the new mortised invader and has labelled him as "to be avoided" but also "mostly harmless". They have an understanding: Cweepio does his thing, and the cat goes elsewhere. One thing that the cat doesn't like much at all is the loud noise the i7+ makes once it returns to its base to empty the contents of its built-in bin into the dirt disposal unit. This is arguably the killer feature, of the Roomba i7+ as it means you don't have to keep emptying the bin inside the robot itself- as every time it goes back to base it empties itself. It's what makes it a truly automated cleaning experience, and I wouldn't want to own an automated vacuum that didn't have it, as otherwise, what's the point? I've had the Roomba around for a couple of months now and I'm yet to have to empty the bag. You can pick up a three-pack for around £18 which isn't too bad.

In terms of set and forget you can set a schedule for your cleaner as you wish during the week and as your smartphone knows your location you can even get it to auto-start when you leave the house. This might be preferable for some as there's no getting away from the fact that the i7 is quite noisy in operation.

Limitations

However, while it can navigate itself around the i7+ does not feature object detection, unlike the J7, which has a camera on the front and can see objects in its path and navigate its way around them before it hits them – such as socks and cables on the floor or even dog poo. The i7+ will detect objects only once it's made contact with its bump sensor so could end up chewing a cable. It did navigate its way around my office chair, but it took a good amount of time to do so. That's why it's best to clear space before it cleans. Once we hear it start, we now turn chairs over onto the table to give it an easier time at cleaning.

Bear in mind though that it's not clean and forget. You do have to remember to maintain your device – which means every month or so taking out the bin, cleaning the filter, (not with water as that will spoil the HEPA feature), removing trapped hair from around the rollers and removing dust and debris from inside. Ironically, a good way of doing this was using the suction hose on my Dyson vacuum, the irony of which was not lost on me. I did wonder if they should invent a robot cleaner whose job it was to clean your robot cleaner, but then I wondered who would clean that robot cleaner and realised it was all getting a big Mandelbrot set, which wouldn't get us anywhere. Just set a maintenance schedule and you'll be fine.

Is it worth it?

Since I've had the i7+ I've very much enjoyed having it around. Ultimately, it has passed the wife test, as while she is naturally suspicious of gadgetry has commented how much time it is saving over manual cleaning. The Roomba proved very effective at keeping our downstairs clear, which is mainly laminate hard floor two carpets and one carpeted room. It has no issues moving over small room dividers and was quick happy moving between floor types. No, it's not as good as an actual person at cleaning and has trouble getting right to the edges in the kitchen, but overall, it's an effective time-saver, which is what smart technology should be about.

Yes, it's expensive, and ultimately a luxury, but if you are thinking of investing in a smart cleaner, it's worth doing and if you can stretch to it, I'd recommend going for one with smart mapping and automatic dirt disposal.

IRobot Roomba I7+ Review: A Convenient, Costly Robot Vacuum

A luxury vacuum cleaner that cleans up after itself — what a time to be alive! The iRobot Roomba i7+ with Clean Base automatic dirt disposal is a new twist on the connected-robot vacuum and a godsend for those who have allergies and aversions to handling dust. This Wi-Fi- connected bot also can clean specific rooms on demand. A self-emptying robot vacuum is certainly a cool concept, but there's definitely a price to pay for all these smarts. Still, it performed well enough for us to include it on our list of best robot vacuums.

iRobot Roomba i7+: Design

The iRobot Roomba i7+ is dressed to impress. It's clad with premium-looking black plastic with charcoal gray on the top and a wide black bumper on the front. The logo on the top conceals a carrying handle and sits above a prominent center "Clean" button. Smaller icons for docking and spot cleaning are placed to its left and right.

The buttons are integrated into the vacuum itself and register pushes with minimal feedback. It's a smart design that prevents dust from entering the button mechanism and causing a problem down the road.

At 3.7 inches high, the Roomba i7+ is the same height as its sibling, the Roomba 690, but taller than the 3.4-inch Shark Ion Robot. It's not quite as tall as the towering 3.9-inch Neato Botvac D7 Connected. The i7+ easily traveled under our furniture with the exception of one low-clearance couch.

With a 13.3-inch diameter, the i7+ is a hair larger than the 13.2-inch D-shaped Botvac D7. The Roomba i7+ only 0.3 inches bigger than the 13-inch Roomba 690, but noticeably larger than the 12.9-inch RoboVac 11s. The i7+'s size didn't deter it from cleaning around chair legs, as the bot deftly maneuvered in tight areas.

Flip the Roomba i7+ over, and you'll find two rubber wheels and one small roller wheel front and center. Instead of bristle and rubber rollers as with most other robot vacuums, the i7+ uses rubber-encased foam. The two rubber rollers have chevron patterns that guide dirt into the vacuum chamber. The first roller has deep chevon fins, while the second roller reverses the chevron pattern with shallower fins studded with rubber dashes, presumably for catching smaller debris.

A three-spoke side brush spins along ahead of the right wheel. A floor-tracking sensor sits on the opposite side, quietly mapping out the surroundings.

The dustbin on the Roomba i7+ pops out, but you're unlikely to use it if you opt for the $250 Clean Base. If you buy the i7+ without the Clean Base, the dustbin holds slightly more and may be washed with water.

Because of the disposal system, the Clean Base has a much larger footprint than other vacuum bases.  However, the Clean Base has a more sophisticated look than the Shark Ion Robot's base-and-hand-vacuum combination.

iRobot Roomba i7+: Setup

The Roomba i7+ is controlled via the iRobot Home app (Android and iOS). Connecting the robot to our phone and  Wi-Fi network was a near seamless process. The i7+ connected faster with the app and our Wi-Fi network than the Roomba 690 did despite using the same iRobot app.

You'll definitely want to use the i7+ with the app, as it walks you through the initial setup. The manuals that come with the bot and its base primarily explain how to clean them.

The first few times the Roomba i7+ cleans, it gives you the option of cleaning and mapping or mapping the house on a "Training Run." Once the bot has mapped out your home, you can view the map in the app and make changes by adding and removing virtual boundaries while giving each room a name. Manipulating the virtual green lines in the app took a little getting used to, but was easy once we got the hang of it.

The i7+ remembers up to 10 different floor plans, which can be edited at any time. After putting up our Christmas tree , we drew in an extra boundary line to keep the bot from vacuuming the tree skirt.

iRobot Roomba i7+: Performance

Watching the Roomba i7+ clean is a little scary — you can almost see it thinking. It would enter a room going one direction and then clean, pause and head toward another area at a slightly different angle.

While the Roomba 690 and the Eufy RoboVac 11s seem to have a "pool ball" approach to cleaning, bouncing off walls in random directions, the i7+ is downright methodical, going back and forth in a parallel lines to get the job done. The robot does a beautiful job carefully winding itself around chair legs as it maps out your home. It barely even disturbed the dog food bowls in our kitchen as it gently cleaned around them.

During the Roomba i7+'s initial cleaning of our mostly open-floor-plan first floor, we opted to have it map the house as it cleaned. After its second run, the Roomba i7+ had completely mapped our first floor. That allowed us to use the smart-map feature to tell the vacuum to clean specific rooms or the whole first floor.

Unlike the Shark Ion Robot and the Eufy RoboVac 11s, the i7+ didn't kick up a lot of debris. It dutifully cleaned up a small pile of breadcrumbs without spreading them around as it spot- cleaned the area. The Neato Botvac D7 accomplished the same task with a little more certainty, sucking up most of the pile the first time it rolled over it.

The height of the i7+ meant it just barely fit under the door of our refrigerator. On its first visit to the kitchen, the i7+ got  slightly stuck. It even tilted as it got wedged under the fridge. Then it made a worrisome grinding sound before spinning free. This did not happen on subsequent cleanings, though it still cleaned around the bottom edge of the fridge.

The Roomba i7+ was the only vacuum in our tests that  conquered the 2.25-inch- thick shag rug in our living room. Although it completely avoided one side of the rug by bumping along its edge, it journeyed onto the rough terrain on the opposite side. Like a ship on rough seas, the Roomba i7+ adjusted to the shag in order to stay its course. The side brush spun more slowly while on the rug, but the bot itself seemed to move more quickly while avoiding parts that set off its sensors. The end result was a half-cleaned rug, but we prefer that over a vacuum getting stuck.

iRobot Roomba i7+: Test results

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Name Smartphone control Overall Cleaning Score Avg. Cleaning time (Hrs:Mins:Secs) Cheerios cleaning score Kitty Litter Cleaning Score Dog Hair Cleaning Score iRobot Roomba i7+ Yes 90.4 18:09 93.1 87.6 90.5 Samsung PowerBot R7070 Yes 87.9 27:30 94.6 87.7 81.5 iRobot Roomba 690 Yes 89.2 1:12:27 99.5 94.9 73.3 Shark Ion Robot R85 Yes 94 1:01:57 100 94 88 Neato Botvac D7 Yes 91.3 10:22 99.8 85 89.3

While the Roomba i7+ looks like it's thinking as it methodically travels your home, our lab test results reveal how fast of a cleaner it is, even if it's not perfect. Although it was quick to clean up a mess, averaging just 18 minutes on carpet in our lab to vacuum up Cheerios, kitty litter and dog hair, it didn't do as thorough a job as we would have liked.

The Roomba i7+ picked up an average of a little more than 93 percent of Cheerios on our hardwood and carpet surface. It failed to match the Botvac D7's excellent 99.8 percent average on the same task and fell just below the Samsung PowerBot R7070's 94.6 percent. In the kitty litter test, the i7+ picked up an average of 87.6 percent of the granules, nearly matching the PowerBot 7070's 87.7 percent and besting the Botvac D7's 84.9 percent. The i7+ ended up wearing some of the litter, too — a fate avoided by the Botvac D7.

However, the Roomba i7+ shone on dog hair, cleaning up an average of 90.5 percent, which bested the Botvac D7 (89.3 percent) and the Shark Ion R85 (88 percent).

One thing that sets premium robot vacuums apart from their less expensive competitors is their cleaning speed. The Roomba i7+ wasn't the fastest cleaner we tested — that crown belongs to the Botvac D7 with a 10 minute and 22 second cleaning average — but it was close. The i7+ averaged a little more than 18 minutes to complete our lab tests. The PowerBot 7070 lagged behind, taking an average of 27 minutes and 30 seconds on our tests.

MORE: Best Smart Home Hub

The Roomba i7+ measured 62.6 decibels in our sound test, a little quieter than the Botvac D7's 66.3 decibels. Although it wasn't hard to have a conversation with the robot maneuvering around our feet, we were thankful we could use a more normal indoor voice when it jetted off to another area.

iRobot Roomba i7+: Clean Base performance

While convenient, the automatic dirt-disposing Clean Base is loud — like super-powered-public-bathroom-hand-dryer loud. It clearly takes a lot of suction to pull the dirt out from the underside of the Roomba i7+ and vertically suck it up into the vacuum bag at the top of the base. It's brief — a few seconds — but it is deafening.

The Clean Base uses cube-shaped old-school vacuum bags, which the company says will hold 30 bins of dirt. Essentially, it's a smaller version of the bag that attached to your mom's mid-1970s Hoover upright, but with a modern update: A plastic sheath slides over the bag hole when you remove it from the Clean Base, preventing dust from flying all over the place. A three-pack of replacement bags costs $14.99.

After three full floor cleanings and two individual room cleanings, there was still plenty of room in the bag. A small amount of fine dust did collect in the lid of the bin, but the thick rubber seal kept it from leaving the base.

iRobot Roomba i7+ review: Verdict

The iRobot Roomba i7+ is great at learning your home's layout and is ideal for challenging surfaces and areas with lots of obstacles. It's a solid performing robot vacuum, too. And, yes, the Clean Base is impressive and easy to empty — especially for those who have back issues.

But, the Rooba i7+ is one of the more expensive robot vacuum we've tested. And it shouldn't be beaten in cleaning tasks by robots that cost a third of its price. That said, if your primary interest in a robot vacuum revolves around cleaning specific rooms on a regular basis, the Roomba i7+ will get the job done quickly, and fairly well, too.

Credit: Tom's Guide

iRobot Roomba i7: Price Comparison

IRobot Roomba I7+ Review: Smarter Than The Average Robot Vacuum

TechiRobot Roomba i7+ review: smarter than the average robot vacuum

All the bells and whistles

All the bells and whistles

by Dan SeifertNov 20, 2018, 5:09 PM UTCLinkFacebookThreads

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Dan Seifert is an editor overseeing The Verge's product reviews and service journalism programs. Dan has covered the technology world for over a decade at The Verge.

I was an extremely late adopter of robot vacuums. The first iRobot hit stores 15 years before I finally purchased a robot vacuum for my own home. When I did, I went cheap: I bought an inexpensive vacuum without any mapping capabilities from Amazon. That cheap robot vacuum has served me well, even if it does just bump around the room until its battery runs out. I still don't believe that robot vacuums can replace a proper weekly vacuuming, but my little bot has surprised me with its ability to suck up dust and debris.

iRobot's Roomba i7+ is on the exact opposite spectrum of robot vacuums from the one I own. If the cheap robot I have is a Kia, the i7+ is the Cadillac of robot vacuums. It can map my entire house. It can be controlled by a voice assistant or from a smartphone app anywhere in the world. It can even empty its own bin. It also costs $949, which is five times more than the robot vacuum I purchased. IRobot also sells an i7 model that has identical cleaning capabilities but doesn't come with the special automatic bin-emptying base for a couple hundred dollars less, but that's a bit like buying a base model BMW.

The i7+ is definitely the future of robot vacuuming that's available in the present. But there are still things I'd like to see improved.

8

Verge Score

iRobot Roomba i7+$950$950The Good

Smart mapping of your entire home

The Bad

High price tag

$950 at iRobotHow we rate and review products

The i7+ is an update to iRobot's high-end Roomba 980 from three years ago. The 980 was capable of mapping a space and efficiently cleaning it, but it would discard the maps after each cleaning session and rebuild them from scratch every time. The i7+ upgrades this feature in a major way: it can now save the maps it creates and use them to improve its cleaning patterns. It also lets me name various rooms in my home so I can tell the vacuum to specifically clean a particular space and ignore others.

I can manage up to 10 different floor plans in Roomba's app for iOS and Android, and I can control the vacuum via voice commands to Alexa, Google Assistant, or from the app itself. My home has three floors, and I can use the app to see each floor and what rooms are in it. If I place the robot on a different floor than its home base, it uses the various sensors and cameras on it to identify which floor it's on automatically and load the appropriate maps. Sadly, it can't yet climb the stairs to get to different floors; I still have to pick it up and carry it like a philistine.

Watching the i7+ clean a floor is a mesmerizing experience, and it's wildly different from how a non-mapping vacuum gets the job done. Instead of just randomly crisscrossing the room until it runs out of steam, the i7+ follows a logistical and predictable pattern, almost like how a lawn care professional trims a field before a sporting event. It will clean an entire room before moving on to the next one, and if its battery runs low or its bin fills up before it's finished, it will remember where it stopped and return to that spot when it's recharged. It's very satisfying to watch it do its job, and if you're running a cleaning cycle, the predictability of it means you can safely move around the vacuum without really having to worry about getting in its way.

A time-lapse of the i7+ cleaning a bedroom in a very satisfying manner.

iRobot says it takes two to three cleaning runs for the i7+ to "learn" the room and produce a map, which is about what I saw in my testing. My main floor, which has three larger rooms in a mostly open plan, was mapped in two runs, while the upstairs floor with multiple bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallways took more runs to fully map. Once a floor is mapped, the app will attempt to identify specific rooms, but you can adjust the virtual boundaries and then name them after it's tried to sort them out. From there, you can tell Alexa or Google Assistant to clean a specific room with voice commands. Should you move furniture or otherwise reconfigure a space, the i7+ will adjust its map the next time it runs a cleaning job and update its database.

iRobot claims these mapping abilities not only ensure the Roomba cleans the entire floor before giving up, but it also allows it to clean in a quicker, more efficient manner since it already knows what areas it has covered and what has yet to be done.

The iRobot app provides detailed maps of your floor plan and reports on cleaning jobs.Image: iRobot

The app also has the usual scheduling options and battery-monitoring features. Unique to the i7+ are the reports after it has completed a job: it can tell me how many square feet it cleaned, how many "dirt events" there were, and how long it took to finish the job. It also shows me a map of all the areas it hit during the cleaning run.

But smart mapping isn't the only luxury feature on the i7+, it also can automatically empty its own bin. The i7+ has a special charging base that sucks all of the dust and dirt out of the vacuum and puts it into a sealed disposable bag. The bag in the base holds 30 bins full of dirt, and you can purchase a three-pack of replacement bags for $14.99 when you've gone through the two that the iRobot comes with.

This system has two advantages over the standard way you empty a robot vacuum: it eliminates putting the dust back into the air when you knock the bin into the garbage can, and it means you only have to worry about emptying it every month or so, instead of every time it runs. Of course, the downside to this is that the base is much larger than a standard charging base, the bags are an added cost that you need to shoulder, and the process for sucking the dirt out of the vacuum is extremely loud.

That leads me into the shortcomings of the i7+. IRobot says the new vacuum is quieter than the 980 it replaces, but this is not a quiet vacuum. It's considerably louder than the basic robot vacuum I'm familiar with, and the cleaning base sounds like a jet engine when it sucks the dirt out of the i7+. If you like to schedule your robot to run in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping, you might find it to be too loud when cleaning and emptying. IRobot says the i7+ has 10 times the suction power of its base models, but the cost of all that power is more noise.

The i7+ also needs some light in the rooms where it's running in order for its various cameras and sensors to work, so running it in a dark room overnight isn't the most efficient way to use it.

And finally, though the i7+ got stuck far less often than my dumb robot in the months I've been testing it, it still has trouble with high-pile carpeting. The shag carpet runner in my upstairs hallway proved to be particularly difficult for the robot to figure out, and it got stuck on the carpet almost every time it ran over it, requiring a manual intervention and reset.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

The i7+ is an impressive robot vacuum with unique features that you won't find on lesser models. I don't necessarily think it's worth five times the cost of a standard vacuum, but once this technology trickles down to lower-end models, it will be very nice to have.

Now, if only robot vacuums could figure out a way to climb stairs.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge

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