Today’s robots are more sophisticated than ever. Most can be controlled with an app on your phone, and some are even voice-enabled. Many can return to the home base for a recharge and then go back to cleaning wherever they left off.

For premium cleaning performance at an affordable price, the iLife V3s Pro vacuum provides excellent value. It picks up all kinds of debris and navigates with ease. It lacks smart home features, but the included remote control works well.

An easy-to-use app offers you plenty of control, should you want it. Plus, you can use it for advanced functions such as a Pet Patrol mode, where you can ask the bot to find your furry friends while you're out, and even let you talk to them via the onboard mic and speaker.

The Wyze impressed us with it's exceptional performance on hard floors, scoring high for pet hair and hard debris pick-up.  It also gave us speedy mapping, which comes in handy, a user-friendly app and useful features such as a location-based trigger.

✅ You have tall thresholds: The Curv is great at scaling tall steps, and on test it very rarely got stuck.

Great at vacuuming, and good at mopping although can sometimes spread wet spillages. Long battery life and fast charging.

). When she’s not testing cool products, she’ll be searching online for more decor ideas to spruce up her family home or looking for a great bargain!

✅ You just want to do whole-home cleans: It can struggle with more specific instructions, but it has pelo problem with regular whole-home cleans.

In our Lab tests: The Samsung ran for well over an hour, had excellent pick-up power and used AI technology to automatically adjust the suction and brush roll speed to the flooring type. Three cleaning modes — min, mid and max — adapt it to different carpet pile heights and densities.

Robot vacs are best suited to convenient, little-and-often cleans, so if you send yours out daily, it'll help you stay on top of your pet's hair and stop it from building up in the first place. You'll likely still want to supplement this with the occasional deep clean with a manual vacuum, though.

If your home has an equal ratio of hardwood floors to carpets then iRobot's hybrid robot mop and vacuum is tough to beat. You get a thorough clean with a mopping pad that automatically retracts atop the vacuum.

First, your robot vacuum can literally self-empty, so if the onboard dustbin is filled mid-route, it can empty itself and then continue cleaning uninterrupted. A self-emptying base saves you from the chore of emptying the dustbin so often as well, with most bases able to hold a minimum of 45 days of dust.

If you’re using a standard charging base, you may have to fix it to the wall, so the robot vacuum won’t knock it Top 3 Automatic Vacuum Cleaners out of place. Some bases come with stickers to help with this issue. If you’re lucky enough to own a robot vacuum with a self-emptying base, it should be heavy enough to hold itself in place.

This isn't a cheap bot, and while I think the featureset and performance justify the price, it'll be out of budget for some. We have more affordable options in our roundup of the best robot vacuums for pet hair – although be aware that if you really want something up to the task, you will likely need to spend a bit more.