With each iteration, Roborock’s flagship robot vacuum cleaners get better and more feature rich.

The S8 Pro Ultra robot vacuum continues this trend with some interesting upgrades over the previous S7 MaxV Ultra. Those enhancements include things like an intelligent warm air-drying system for its mop, improved suction and a dual rubber roller brush system for fewer tangles.

We’ve been living with the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra to find out how it handles daily cleaning and mopping tasks.

Imposing presence and impressive cleaning

• 6000Pa suction, 5200mAh battery, 350ml on-board dustbin, 180 mins runtime
• Automatic emptying, self-cleaning, self-drying, self-refilling
• LDS Laser Navigation, High Precision Map, Multi-floor mapping

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra comes in a huge box and once you’ve set it up it’s equally as imposing in the home too. So make sure you have enough space for the robot and its dock before you buy.

This imposing design has a number of benefits though. The most obvious of which is its self-emptying capabilities.

Once set up this robot vacuum cleaner is designed to essentially manage itself. You set a schedule in the app, tweak a few settings to suit your home and needs and then just let it do its thing. And that’s the joy of this machine.

It is a feature-packed robot vacuum and quite possibly the most feature-rich we’ve seen.

The dock is a charging station, but it’s also a place for the S8 Pro Ultra to empty itself, refill its mopping reservoir and even clean and dry its mop before it goes out for another scheduled clean.

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is equipped with various sensors to help it navigate your home. These sensors include a PreciSense LiDAR Navigation system that allows it to scan your home as it cleans, intelligently and automatically avoiding obstacles.

This allows the bot to digitally map out your home, meaning you can then send it to clean specific rooms or a whole floor. But it also is able to cope with obstacles thrown in its path even if they’re different on a day-to-day basis. For example, if toys, shoes, clothes or other items are on the floor one day, but not the next, it’ll account for that as it cleans, and actively avoid these issues as it vacuums. This means that the S8 Pro Ultra rarely gets stuck.

The S8 Pro Ultra is well-designed in a number of ways. Some of these are small features that make it superior to other bots or just convenient in various ways.

One of these is the dual brush system, which is different from the classic design. These are rubber rollers that promise better cleaning on a variety of surfaces, but also fewer issues with clogging, tangling and other issues that make performance suffer.

They are nestled behind a brush guard system to stop clogs, but more importantly, also have detachable ends.

It’s these small details that make the biggest differences in our experience. Over time the rollers with still inevitably get hair caught on them, but the hair finds its way to the tips of the rollers and then you can pull them apart and simply remove any hair or fibre with ease.

The Roborock S8 series offers the most powerful suction yet (6,000Pa) and it shows. We found this robot vacuum cleaner to be pleasantly capable of cleaning on a variety of surfaces, but perhaps the most telling example of the sheer power was one incident involving a child’s belongings.

We had a notification via the Roborock app that something was preventing the bot from self-emptying, so we went to investigate.

It transpired that the S8 Pro Ultra had managed to suck up a small padlock. This lock is part of child’s diary that had somehow found its way onto the carpet but hadn’t been seen by the sensors or cameras.

We found that this robot vacuum cleaner is generally well skilled at identifying problematic objects, and will notify you in the app when it sees obstacles it cannot pass.

This includes strewn clothes and discarded toys, but there are limits – and so yes, a padlock can get sucked up.

This might sound bad depending on how you look at it, as that could have clogged the self-emptying dock, but it does show just how powerful the suction is. It’s also a lesson in making your kids pick up after themselves before you set the vacuum loose, but that’s not one we’ve managed to teach yet (send help).

It mops floors as well

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is a multi-capable device. As well as powerful vacuuming, it also offers interesting mopping capabilities.

The mopping isn’t an afterthought though. This robot vacuum cleaner uses VibraRise 2.0 mopping tech which has several benefits, one of which is obviously the ability to clean hard floors.

With its sensors, though, it will also raise the mopping system when it detects that it has moved onto carpet. So it can change how it’s cleaning from room to room.

It’s not much to look at as it just seems to be a microfibre cloth attached with velcro to the underside of the robot. It is, however, much more than meets the eyes.

That much is obvious when you consider that the dock has both a clean and dirty water reservoir.

This system allows the bot to clean and mop and then return to the dock change its water, clean its mop and be ready for the next clean.

This robot vacuum is smarter than many though as the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra not only does all this but also dries itself as well.

The mopping is not a replacement for a proper manual mopping of your home but it is surprisingly good. We saw the hard floors in our home were mopped more effectively than we saw with competitors, like the Sømløs S2, and overall delivered pretty impressive results.

The system is clever enough that you won’t find your carpets are mopped either. The mop simply rises out of the way when the bot is on carpet.

One thing we did find though was that the bot struggles with thick rugs.

We have a large, plush rug in our living room that it simply wouldn’t try to clean. The bot detected that it existed and then simply refused to go near that area. The Sømløs S2 would mount that rug and then get stuck and need rescuing – which is arguably worse.

The robot vacuum is powerful in terms of its hardware features, but it also has a lot of settings within the app that let you do things too. Once the virtual map is created you can use it to programme specific rooms for the bot to clean or no-go zones for it to avoid. You can also tell it to boost for deep carpet cleaning and even tell it you’ve got pets that need avoiding too.

The app allows for multi-floor mapping so you can use it on different floors of your home with relative ease and then save those maps as well.

Obviously, you’ll have to manually recover it when it’s done and return it to its dock though, as it doesn’t have the ability to mount the stairs yet. Still, there are all sorts of settings to tweak to your personal preference.

Verdict

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is another winner in our book. It offers powerful and intelligent cleaning capabilities and manages its own workload for mostly hands-off home cleaning.

That said, it does come with a hefty price tag and you’ll need a large empty space to make room for it, but otherwise this is a great cleaning machine.