Best Robotic Vacuums for Pet Hair

CR’s take: The Eufy 11 S is one of the lower-priced vacuums in our ratings, yet it still earns a Very Good rating for pet-hair pickup. This robovac doesn’t have an all-rubber brush roll and instead has a mix of bristles and rubber. There’s an added comb tool to help remove pet hair from the roll itself. (All-rubber brush rolls tend to be easier to clean and don’t get pet hair tangled as easily.) One quirk is this model’s semi-random navigation system. The vacuum drives until it bonks into a wall or piece of furniture, pivots, and then repeats the process until the battery runs out.

CR’s take: The iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO has brushless, rubberized rollers that help it hit our pet-hair cleaning test out of the park. It’s a great option for homes of any size because it navigates in a grid pattern and keeps track of the spots it has or hasn’t cleaned. It can learn the layout of one story of your home and save it as a two-dimensional Smart Map in a companion smartphone app. With this feature enabled, the bot won’t have to start navigating from scratch every time it runs, so it should finish the job faster and run into walls and furniture less often. You can also use the Smart Map to tell the Roomba i3 EVO to clean specific rooms and avoid others.

CR’s take: The iRobot Roomba S9+ features an easily removable rubber brush roll that moves in a counter-rotating motion. That helps the vac earn an Excellent rating for its ability to pick up pet hair on medium-pile carpet. This vac also earns an Excellent rating in our bare-floor and navigation tests. It picks up pet hair easily and doesn’t cause any problems with the brush roll. Another selling point: Once the robot is docked, a vacuum in the docking station automatically sucks the contents from the bin into an enclosed disposable bag in the base. 

CR’s take: The Roborock S7+ aces our pet-hair removal test. Its cleaning performance is also strong across the board—on carpets, bare floors, and even up against edges. Its laser-assisted nav system allows it to quickly and thoroughly clean a room, bumping into fewer walls and furniture legs than a lot of the other robot vacuums we’ve tested. It has a Smart Mapping feature as well, and comes with a dock that can automatically empty the bin. The S7+ also has a clip-on mop that will wipe your bare floors and lift itself slightly when it senses rugs to avoid getting them wet. (We haven’t lab-tested the mop, but some of our experts have used it at home and say it’s decent—and certainly more effective than not wiping your floors.)

CR’s take: The Samsung Jet Bot AI+ VR50T95735W is an all-around champ in our robot vacuum tests, receiving top scores for its ability to pick up pet hair and clean bare floors and the edges of walls and corners. It also offers impeccable navigation and garners an Excellent rating for ease of use. It comes with a self-emptying dock for no additional charge. This model features WiFi connectivity with smartphone control via the SmartThings app. In our tests, its data security is quite strong, but its data privacy is middling.