Roomba 980, Roomba 880, Neato BotVac 65 cleaning test

[jdong]

To better evaluate cleaning performance of these bots, I decided to fence off a section of my living room to perform a controlled cleaning test.

The test: 10 half inch by half inch squares of paper were randomly scattered on the ground. I made sure to have some edges, cover all the floor area, and also put one under a black chair in the middle of the room. A black chair was placed in the center of the room as an obstacle to see how the mapping robots would cope -- without the black chair, the results were more boring, with both mapping robots making nice neat lines across the whole floor.

I monitored the test during the whole duration, keeping note of when the robots picked up all the pieces, and when all the pieces were picked up.

Time lapse videos (20x accelerated) are available here:

Roomba 980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOPyrULJYM
Roomba 880: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6N3yDjq6FQ
Neat BotVac 65: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cf-mTEi1xg


Results

It's hard to declare a winner, all bots did really well. The Neato BotVac was the quickest to complete its cycle, despite wasting almost a minute being stuck under a chair! (Check out 15s into the time lapse video). The BotVac gets stuck under a pair of these chairs every few days and now I see how -- it lifted itself up a few times trying to turn while having a corner stuck against a leg. The Roomba 980 was quickest to pick everything up (in 6 minutes), but it had a much longer cycle time, spending a lot of time going over regions it already went over, especially edges. The Roomba 880 did quite well, which supports my anecdotal observations: 10 minutes into the cleaning cycle it already picked everything up, but it continued to randomly bounce around until I lost patience. You can see from the video that its coverage is more biased towards edges and the chair, but it did seem to criss cross over every area of the carpet. Just don't sit around waiting for it to finish!

Note that I originally did the Roomba 980 in Eco Mode to reduce the noise level since I was watching. But, after seeing it drive over a piece of paper but fail to pick it up, I decided that it would be more fair to test it in Automatic (e.g. Carpet Boost) mode. Sure enough, Carpet Boost picked up every piece.


One thing I learned about this test is that in order to fairly compare performance of these bots, you must take into account how long it spent cleaning. Namely, Neato is very exact about doing only 1 pass over every surface, but both Roombas will do some amount of overlap. Especially the Roomba 880 -- if testing in a small area, it will simply bounce around for an hour with little regard to the size of the area -- which may explain why CNET found it cleaned better than the 980.

[vic7767]

jdong Thanks for the detail and effort in performing your robot evaluation. Great work !

[jdong]

Thanks! My pleasure. The clip with the BotVac and the chair was exceptionally amusing, at low speeds you can see how close it got to lifting itself off the ground. I made a 4x speed video here -- the real wall clock time was 2 min 5 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KogucNQRg2g

[saba11]

I had a similar situation when I had a case of Roomba 880 vs 980. I ended up trying out both where the Roomba 980 turned out to be a better option but the price difference is something to be aware of.

Since the Roomba 880 is a lot cheaper, I finalized my decision by sticking with the 880 model.