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I recently reviewed the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra, which has remained the best of the floorbots I’ve tested over the last year. I was excited by Roborock’s announcements at CES 2024 that they’d be releasing a literal fleet of new bots this year. This week I’ll be reviewing two of those robots: the Q Revo Max V and the S8 MaxV Ultra, both of which mop, vacuum, and self-fill and empty. I’m pleased to say that while the S8 Pro Ultra is still an incredibly well-built bot, there are improvements in both new robots that make these new releases worthwhile, without losing any of the features that made me love the S8. The Roborock Q Revo Max V ($1199.99, available in April) is an upgrade to previous models with extending brushes that can hug a wall or corner, upgraded suction power, and a new AI voice assistant that brings more fun to the experience.
New extending brushes offer more reach
The unit itself is two parts: the base, which houses the vacuum bag, the clean water tank, dirty water tank, and the entire cleaning mechanism for the robot, and then the robot itself. The entire footprint of the tower is a little smaller than bots I’ve recently tested like the Ecovacs Deebot and the Eufy X10 and came in a gleaming white (it’s unclear if it will be available in black as well). The actual bot looks like its predecessors: Roborocks are round, with a protruding round “button” on top. One of the reasons I enjoy this brand is the lids on their bots are magnetic, so they come off and on easily for cleaning or accessing the inside of the bot (which you’ll really only need to do for setup and possibly, later, for maintenance).
One major differentiator between the S8 and Q Revo lines are the mop itself. The S8 line features a mop pad, while the Q Revo has spinning disk mops—in this case, two of them on the backend of the bot. At the front are the rollers for the vacuum. The Q Revo has one roller and the S8 has two, but I haven’t found the number of rollers to correlate with the efficiency of vacuuming. If anything, the Q Revo was a little easier to unclog when something got caught—accessing the rollers just requires flipping the robot over, and then squeezing two clips to release the cover. I found the process easy compared to other robots like Roombas, where it was often hard to make the pieces fit back together. Roborock does a great job making the ends different enough that you always understand how to put things back together. The familiar rotating brush is also present, to help sweep debris into the robot’s path, and it certainly seems larger than other bots, which should help get more debris closer to the wall. The water tanks each hold just over 4 liters of water. Over the two weeks I used the Q Revo on the highest setting, at least once daily, I didn’t need to refill the water tank, which was an improvement over the S8 Pro Ultra and all the other bots I’ve recently tested.
Easy installation and mapping
I found the Q Revo easy to unpack and install; something worth noting as I routinely install and uninstall these robots is that Roborock plans their packaging thoughtfully, and this tower required little more than attaching the docking ramp to the base, and it was ready to go. Installation was painless and took about ten minutes. Under the lid is a wifi indicator light; you load up the Roborock app, push two buttons on the robot itself to send the wifi into open mode, and the app located it within seconds. At that point, the app pushes some updates and wifi connections that are mostly hands off. I didn’t experience any disconnections during the time of testing—the Roborock remained online the whole time. Notably, it came back online quickly after two power outages, which you’ll know because it announces itself through the voice assistant, known as Rocky. (More on that in a bit.) Like other LiDAR-based robots, which use laser for guidance and mapping, the Q Revo mapped the entire space within seconds of leaving the dock, which will never fail to impress me. The map of your space is generated in the app, where you can manipulate it. On the first outing, you can choose whether to have the robot clean or just map, and I always recommend sticking to mapping so the robot is less likely to get stuck as it scopes out your space. While the LiDAR is immediate, the robot will still roam the space, almost confirming what the lasers saw.
Credit: Roborock
Customizable settings
Once in cleaning mode, Roborock has expanded the previously available options to now include four levels of vacuuming and mopping intensity, and the brushes or mops will raise and lower based on the floor type detected below it. For those concerned about robots accidentally mopping your rugs, this is not something I’ve encountered being problematic on any model I’ve tested with LiDAR. Modern robots do an incredible job detecting floor textures, and the Q Revo is no different.
The Q Revo has 7000Pa of suction, which is substantially more than previous models. One of the ways these latest models are differentiating themselves is the sheer number of options available via the app to customize your vacuum experience, and here is where I think you can make or break your floorbot experience. Unlike iRobot, which is notorious for the inexplicable pattern the robot takes across your floor, Roborock allows you to choose the pattern, either back and forth or slightly more randomized. On top of the intensity, you can also choose if the bot should make one or two passes on the space. However, the setting that will likely affect your vacuum the most, I believe, is the obstacle avoidance. In this panel of settings, you can tell the robot you have a pet, which means it will detect both the pet and said pet’s poop. There is a “less collision” mode, that means the bot will try to foresee walls and furniture so it’ll bump into them less, and AI Environment recognition and obstacle avoidance. With the pet details and collision modes on, the floor simply wasn’t as well-cleaned, but turning them off improved effectiveness. I quickly realized that keeping the robot set at max suction and the back and forth pattern resulted in such a dramatically cleaner floor there was no reason to reduce the settings.
The Q Revo didn’t absorb the fluff from inside stuffed pet toys the way the S8 did—and that’s something I’m often battling, so I’d need to remove it manually with some frequency. A note of appreciation for the brand is that the roller being stuck on debris does not render the bot immobile—you can still return it to the base so it’ll reveal itself for easy grabbing, or use the remote control in the app to direct it to you. You can generally tell when the bot has something in it, because it will rattle or sound off, but again, I appreciate it will keep trucking along anyway. The vacuum is definitely the better of the two modes; the Q Revo did an impressive job on deep pile carpets, low pile rugs, tile and wood floors, and it has a sizable enough container on board that it rarely had to return to the base mid-vacuum to empty itself. The base got an upgrade on power, too. This is important as it determines how well the base pulls all the debris out of the bot.
Other robot vacuums to consider:
A good mop for daily cleaning
I am impressed with how effective newer bots with a mop pad are at getting the floor clean with just a pad, but the Q Revo features two beefy spinning brushes. While they provided an admirable clean, it wasn’t as effective as the S8 line in deep cleaning. It got rid of muddy paw prints, a spilled drink, and other big messes effectively, but did not give the deep scrub I’d hoped for on my white tile. In that way, these mops are good for everyday maintenance, but you’ll still need to go in for a weekly deep clean with something manual. What I did like was the way the spinning brushes extended out from the body of the bot to get right up to the wall and around obstacles. It is the best mop for wall-to-wall coverage that I’ve tested and did a great job under toe kicks in my kitchen, a notoriously tough spot to get really clean. Like other bots, it struggles with inside corners, so those will be part of your weekly manual cleanup. The Q Revo gives you an additional layer of setting tools as well, and in some cases, they helped. For instance, with the mop on the highest intensity, you can even adjust how much water is used to make it even more effective. You wouldn’t want to leave it on high water use all the time, but I did find it was helpful for more stubborn spots on the tile and wood.
An app with several different settings
While the Roborock app offers a substantial amount of settings, it was still relatively easy to find what I needed, and to affect the settings I wanted. In particular, the mapping options remain one of the best experiences out there. You can easily split spaces, merge them, create zones on the fly, or tell the app where floors or furniture change or are present, if the LiDAR got it wrong. Like other newer machines, this model offers remote viewing, which is just an onboard camera that lets you watch live video from the robot. This is mostly helpful if the robot is stuck somewhere or you want to monitor how well it’s cleaning—a few robots now offer this option and I struggle to find the necessity.
An onboard voice assistant needs more time to bake
The most delightful new feature, if not fully cooked, was the voice assistant named Rocky onboard the robot. It lacks some of the flexibility of other assistants like Google and Alexa—you can only summon it with “Hello Rocky,” and if you have more than one robot in the house, you’ll do a lot of whispering to get the attention of the right one, since the app won’t let you differentiate them. Once you have its attention, you can issue Rocky a very specific set of commands, like “start cleaning,” clean a specific room, or my favorite, “clean here,” which will then try to locate your voice. Spoiler: It wasn’t great at this, but it was charming watching Rocky try. I assume Rocky will improve and Roborock will issue updates over time, and it was useful to be able to ask the robot to clean areas on the fly if you can remember the very specific wording of the command. Siri would use AI to try to understand if you meant “start cleaning” when you said “clean now,” but Rocky doesn’t yet.
Overall I was happy with the Q Revo Max V. While I maintain that even the best floorbot is a maintenance tool rather than a complete vacuum/mopping solution, this model delivered on that premise. When the settings were dialed in, I got good coverage and great vacuuming from wall to wall, though I did have to clear the vacuum rollers occasionally. The mop is great for surface-cleaning, particularly to the edge of walls, but isn’t for deep cleaning, and may require more passes and adjusting the setting occasionally to get it right. Rocky, as an AI assistant is a fun addition that I look forward to future developments with. At $1,199, the Q Revo Max V is still an expensive machine, but seems worth the value comparatively to other floorbots, including the new S8 Max V at $1,599, which I’ll review later this week. The Q Revo Max V will be available via the Roborock website and other retailers like Amazon in early April. Of course, details around price and availability are subject to change before the actual release.
