iRobot Roomba 681 Robot Vacuum Cleaner Test: Noisy Cleaner

For com­par­i­son: the much more expen­sive Neato Bot­vac Con­nect­ed and iRo­bot Room­ba 980 col­lect­ed only 50 and 60 grams, respec­tive­ly. So this is an excel­lent result for a vac­u­um clean­er cost­ing about 25 thou­sand rubles.

Better than before

The 900 series sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly cov­ers the edges and runs along all the lines in the apart­ment. The 600 series of this tech­nique is not enough. Instead, Room­ba 681, as before, moves around the rooms, seem­ing­ly chaot­i­cal­ly. How­ev­er, the robot man­ages to achieve almost com­plete cov­er­age of the area, even with a vis­it to the next room. The neg­a­tive con­se­quence of chaot­ic move­ment is the length­en­ing of the dis­tance trav­eled: it takes about 30 min­utes for the 681 to clean one room, while his more ratio­nal col­leagues do the same job in less than 20 min­utes. This also explains the greater amount of garbage removed: the robot can pass through the same place sev­er­al times. How­ev­er, the same effect can be forcibly achieved on more expen­sive mod­els.

The rest of the nav­i­ga­tion is also not the most thought­ful. Room­ba can ride around a chair leg five times, bump into fur­ni­ture loud­ly, and close doors. At the same time, he has no prob­lems with cables. On the con­trary, in the test room, he dragged a net­work exten­sion cord with him, as if noth­ing had hap­pened. Against all exter­nal cir­cum­stances, it inde­pen­dent­ly returns to the charg­ing sta­tion and uses sen­sors to rec­og­nize espe­cial­ly dirty places, which it then cleans more inten­sive­ly in Spot mode.

Spartan and loud

As basic fea­tures, Room­ba 681 offers the abil­i­ty to pro­gram dai­ly clean­ing and man­u­al Spot clean­ing. This is good. The dust col­lec­tor is dis­ap­point­ing here: it is half-open and prac­ti­cal­ly not insu­lat­ed. For aller­gy suf­fer­ers, this will be a real test. It will be very bad if you try to use the robot while you are at home. The lit­tle clean­ing assis­tant makes a deaf­en­ing noise. While clean­ing on car­pets, it can still be tol­er­at­ed, but when it hits hard sur­faces, the sound becomes sim­i­lar to the work of elec­tric gar­den shears.

Pros and cons

+ sur­pris­ing­ly good dust suc­tion

+ few prob­lems with cables and light car­pets

— unac­cept­able vol­ume

— chaot­ic ori­en­ta­tion

— rough nav­i­ga­tion

Alternative: Neato Robotics Neato BotVac 80

Wide brush, large trash can and smart nav­i­ga­tion: although the Bot­vac 80 costs a lit­tle more, around 27 thou­sand rubles, but thanks to bet­ter nav­i­ga­tion, it will not take for­ev­er to clean.

Conclusion

The Room­ba 681 is a robot vac­u­um with decent suc­tion pow­er and not much extra func­tion­al­i­ty. Dur­ing the suc­tion test, the robot per­formed very well, pick­ing up a fair­ly large amount of dirt. How­ev­er, in terms of equip­ment and choice of acces­sories for its class, it offers only the nec­es­sary min­i­mum. A par­tic­u­lar­ly neg­a­tive impres­sion is pro­duced by an unpleas­ant­ly high noise lev­el.