Home Improvement

Roomba i7 or 980? Which Is the Best Buy

Roomba i7 vacuum cleaning robot is designed with rollers, long enough to pick larger dirt chunks as compared to other vacuum cleaning robots. The rollers are an excellent design when it comes to cleaning carpets, since the deep nubs provide far much better agitation as compared to the use of brushes and blades. Roomba i7 is a bit narrower (13.8 inches) as compared to 980, which measures 13.8 inches in diameter; both of them are 3.6 inches tall. When it comes to cleaning up the edges of a floor, both the Roomba i7 and Roomba 980 have a challenge. A cleaning test done on the two had them leave dirt on the edges of the floor. Due to its design with rollers, Roomba i7 is a better carpet cleaner as compared to Roomba i7 vs 980.

Roomba 980 iRobot is an improvement of the previous iRobot version, the Roomba 890. Its main tool for navigation is the VSLAM, being the first ever Roomba product to use this tool. The Roomba 980 is fitted with special acoustic sensors that help in detecting the amount of dirt on the floor. Whenever it senses one part of the floor having more dirt than the others, it spends more time on that section in order to ensure that it cleans it up well.

Roomba 980 has the same design as i7 in that, they both have one side brush, other brushes that counter-rotate, and are fitted with a motor at the back. However, while Roomba i7 has consistent maps, Roomba 980 doesn’t have, and thus it cannot clean a specific area, since it doesn’t save the maps. Due to this aspect, the Roomba 980 must draw maps of the cleaned areas whenever it cleans, making it less effective as compared to Roomba i7.

Both Roomba i7 and Roomba 980 make use of IMU data, gyro, cameras, VSLAM as well as IR sensors. The persistent mapping feature that is in Roomba i7 makes it more efficient than Roomba 980 in the sense that, it can save up to ten home maps, then use the saved map every time it is cleaning the same home, without drawing the maps afresh. Using the existing data, i7 can plot a pattern that is more efficient and convenient to use when it is cleaning. The user can also instruct the i7 robot to clean one room, for example, and leave the rest, which is not possible with Roomba 980. These additional features in i7 require internet connectivity, without which, the Roomba i7 will be like Roomba 980, which does not necessarily require internet connectivity for it to function. Roomba i7 is also known to have a better object evasion capability as compared to its 980 counterpart.