Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I thought certainly by now, with robotic vacuums having been on the market for several years and multiple generations of product surely these must be pretty reliable devices! So we took the plunge and picked up this very new model from who we perceived as the leading manufacturer in this space, Roomba. We couldn't have been more wrong, the 960 could not have been less efficient or effective for us. Sure it picked up dog and hair dirt in its random travails around the rooms but the actual coverage path in many of the rooms was nowhere near complete, the 690 also quite frequently got stuck in very simple areas (mostly under the bed) and about 1/3 of the time could not find its way back to its base before running out of power. We also found the 690 refusing to vacuum the area rugs because the black or dark blue color in the rug set off the cliff detector so it refused to vacuum those areas. This is the first floor there are no cliffs. Roomba support told me that there is no setting in software to turn off the cliff detector so no way the 690 will allow itself to vacuum any dark colored rugs! (iRobot support told me this is the case for ALL Roomba products) The 690 coverage pattern on any floor is totally random. It does not know where it has been and not been. As such we found it covering the same areas it had already been over and over again. This model does not build a map of the floor layout and then use that as a basis for coverage. We have 3 - 4 connected rooms on the first floor, 2 of which are carpet (both short and shag (master bedroom and family room)), 1 hardwood floor connected dining room/living room with an area rug and a Pergo floored kitchen. For these reasons the 690 was pretty much useless device that doesn't work for us so we returned it to Amazon.