Down in the dirt with four flagship robot vacuums

We gravitated pretty naturally towards robot vacuums for one of our first home appliance round-ups. To get our footing in the space, we tackled the flagship model from four different vendors. That gave us a broad price range, from Infinuvo's new, $349 CleanMate QQ5, all the way up to LG's $799 Hom-Bot Square. Surprise: price doesn't always correlate with performance. Of course we looked at a Roomba, too. iRobot sent over its top-of-the-line Roomba 790, which comes in at a heady $699.

One of the most interesting things about our tests was watching each robot make pathing decisions. This upgrade gives him a world of possibilities, linear approach, finding the boundaries of the room, and then moving along in neat rows within that space. iRobot's approach is starkly different. An array of sensors on the Roomba constantly reads its surroundings and sends back information about where to go. The resulting navigation can look data-drunk, and the Roomba can take longer to finish a run than its competitors, but in some circumstances it resulted in the cleanest room.

None of these vacuums will replace a human-driven upright yet. Breaking Bad fans might also remember a Roomba representing a severe form of frivolous consumption on that show. It's hard to disagree entirely with that idea. A robot vacuum does carry the whiff of silly self-indulgence. On the other hand, these devices do pick up dirt, and without much human intervention. Some of them even do the job rather well.Regardless of its round up-low $349 price tag, the Infinuvo's $349 CleanMate QQ5 failed to deliver acceptable performance. We can forgive a certain capability gap between products $300 to $400 apart, but between its hard-to-clean rollers, thoughtless dust bin design, and, in certain circumstances, its inability to clean, we wouldn't recommend this vacuum at any price.