Like last year’s model, it also meets the TÜV Rheinland privacy and security certification. This is important, because it navigates via AI.See—a “visual recognition technology.” Basically, it uses a camera to steer around your house. It’s not upward-facing, and Eufy assures its customers that the photos are not stored in a server and are deleted before the next cleaning cycle. However, Eufy also doesn’t offer additional security features like two-factor authentication. This is just something to keep in mind if you feel squicky about having a camera in your home.

AI.See is interesting. Its estimates of its own accuracy seem generous—I forgot to screenshot all the instances where it identified my daughter’s various hair things as poop and warned me to “clean this area immediately.” I did think it helped the robot navigate seamlessly around my house. The few times it got stuck, I found that the roller brush had become ensnared in my daughter’s or my long hair. It’s understandably much harder to see hair than it is to identify and avoid shoelaces, which tend to trip up even the best robot vacuums.

My first floor has five rooms with a total of about 800 square feet of cleanable space, depending on how widely my children’s stuffed animals are scattered at any given moment. The mapping function works quite well; it stored multiple maps on multiple floors without a problem. The battery life is decent—it can finish a whole first-floor vacuum in about an hour and a half, using about 75 percent of its battery life. You can also raise or lower the cleaning intensity, from fast to deep, and the suction power has a range from Quiet to Max.

Photograph: Adrienne So

On Max, it has a suction power of about 8,000 pascals. I have a theory about suction power. As I learned from the founders of the robot vacuum Matic, the level of suction power may matter less than whether your roller brush is able to agitate the carpet thoroughly. In any case, I didn’t notice a huge difference in the cleanliness level on the frequently trod areas of my carpet when I upped the suction power from Standard to Max.

The Price Is Right

The mopping is particularly good. The X9 Pro was capable of cleaning up half a jar of spilled syrup, and the X10 Pro works just as well. As with last year’s model, it exerts about 2 pounds of downward pressure with two mops that rotate 180 times per minute. When my children inexplicably decided to throw bananas at the breakfast table and leave sticky banana mash on the floor, the X10 Pro cleaned it up in minutes.

Mopping is the most disgusting household chore and the one I would do the least frequently if I could. Mopping the hardwood and tiled areas of my first floor (about 230 square feet) takes about 30 minutes, including time spent washing the mops. An onboard water tank keeps the mops continuously wet for the entire cleaning time. The dirty water tank has to be emptied and rinsed out every three or four cleans. Emptying and rinsing the tank is, as always, a vile and terrible task, but at least it doesn’t happen that often.