The eufy 11S MAX is also a quiet performer, so it won’t interfere with daily activities or sleep, and its self-charging feature means it always returns to its dock when the battery is low.

Historically, robovacs aren't great at cleaning up to the edges of rooms, but today's best robot vacuums add spinning side brushes designed to flick debris into the robot's suction path.

We'll also look at how the robot tackles the issue of switching between vacuuming and mopping – will it reliably detect floor type, and pick up its mop pad when moving from hard floor onto carpet, for example?

I really like Roomba’s dock design, which, while large enough to accommodate two rather small water tanks, is the most stylish of all the multifunction docks.

And it’s recently started popping up ads for Roomba products when I navigate between screens — which is one of the features I did not want to see migrate over from the competition.

On test, we found it did a fantastic job of clearing spillages. We were also impressed with the comprehensive docking station, which helps ease the burden of the maintenance tasks involved with mopping robot vacuums.

In our lab, CR’s engineers put vacuum cleaners through a set of tough tests to evaluate how well a model picks up dirt, how much debris it retains, how easy it is to maneuver, and how noisy it is. We embed sand and pet hair into carpets to see how effective the appliance is at picking it up.

The app is very hard to follow, making it tricky to access all of the bot’s features. Mapping was fast, but it didn’t recognize all my rooms on the first go. It did better the second time, although splitting up rooms and naming them in the app was painful.

✅ You want something that mops well: The X10 Pro Omni's mops had no problem with tricky cleaning tasks like sticky sauces and dried-on sugary drinks.

My biggest frustration with apps is maps that are fiddly to update and / or crash and must be rebuilt constantly. Most vacuums now have voice control (see FAQs), but some offer more in-depth control, such as telling Alexa to have the robot clean twice under the dining room table.

Alistair is a London-based journalist who has been writing about tech for over a decade. He has tested numerous robovacs over the years for TechRadar, from brands like iRobot, Eufy and Roborock. His favourites match intelligent navigation with smart design.

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 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.

Using Matrix Clean navigation, the Shark ensures no areas are missed by Top 3 Automatic Vacuum Cleaners cleaning in a precision matrix grid, passing over each section multiple times for comprehensive coverage.

And a capable robot vacuum could really be worth the investment if you're finding it tricky to stay on top on manual cleaning.