Review Methodology

Every product on RoboVac Compare is scored editorially on nine criteria, from 0 to 10:

• Cleaning Performance — deliberately NOT a suction-Pa leaderboard. Peak suction power (Pa), normalized against this catalog's range, contributes at most half of this score; the rest comes from navigation sophistication (basic vs. LiDAR vs. LiDAR-plus-camera) and obstacle-avoidance tier, since a robot's real-world cleaning coverage depends on reaching and navigating the floor, not suction power alone. A manufacturer publishing a bigger Pa number does not by itself guarantee a higher score here.
• Pet Hair — based on documented anti-tangle brush technology (e.g., dual anti-tangle brushes, zero-tangle designs) described in manufacturer materials, plus suction.
• Mopping — 0 for vacuum-only models; higher for models whose dock automatically washes AND dries the mop pads versus a basic spinning or vibrating mop with manual pad care.
• Navigation — based on the mapping technology tier: basic sensor navigation, LiDAR-based mapping, or LiDAR/ToF combined with a camera and/or 3D structured light.
• Obstacle Avoidance — based on the sophistication of the obstacle-detection system described by the manufacturer, from basic bump/LiDAR avoidance up to multi-sensor AI camera systems and, uniquely, physical leg-climbing designs.
• Battery — derived from published per-charge runtime in minutes, normalized across the catalog.
• Dock Features — based on how much the dock automates: none, dust-only auto-empty, or a full all-in-one station (empty, wash, dry, refill).
• Ease of Use — derived from self-empty capacity (days between manual emptying) and confirmed smart-home/voice-assistant support.
• Value for Money — a composite of the other eight scores, adjusted for the model's typical position in its own manufacturer's lineup (entry/mid/flagship), since we don't yet have live Amazon pricing to compute value against an actual dollar figure.

These are editorial judgments, not Amazon's official ratings, and they are not derived from customer reviews. When a manufacturer doesn't publish a figure for a given spec, we score conservatively rather than guessing, and we say so directly in that product's review.

Scores are recalculated for every product whenever a new product is added to the catalog, since several scores (cleaning performance, battery) are normalized against the current range of the whole catalog.

Editor's Pick

The "Editor's Pick" badge is intentionally selective: only the top few overall scores in the current catalog earn it, recalculated automatically from the same nine-score average described above every time the catalog changes. It is never assigned by hand — a product can't be marked a pick without actually ranking there.