Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra review

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

This is what a word-class robot vacuum and mop looks like. Its features are high-quality and comprehensive and it leaves floors immaculate. However, at this stage it is very expensive, and you can get the same feature set elsewhere for less.

Price When Reviewed

$1,799.99 (base model), $1,899 (with refill and drainage system)

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Retailer Price

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Roborock, a brand associated with Xiaomi, is now one of the best known robot vacuum manufacturers in the world. Its robots have some of the newest and best tech available. Packed full of features and spiced up with AI, its new flagship, the S8 MaxV Ultra, does just about everything you could ask of a combined robot vacuum and mop.

Let’s investigate.

Design and Build

Okay, there’s a lot to take in with the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra.

The first thing you’ll unpack is the RockDock: the charging and water tank station. It’s only 30cm high and quite compact, only 41cm wide and 42cm-ish deep. This means that the aesthetic of the RockDock is very different to most large self-emptying and refilling stations, which tend to be quite tall.

Wherever you place them, they become, essentially, a piece of furniture within that room. Their dominant presence is why we’ve often suggested you situate a charging station of this type in a utility or boot room.

The lower height and more rectangular footprint of the RockDock gets around this problem; it is low enough to fit under a console or side table, a protruding countertop or even a wall bench. If you do choose to place it on its own, it won’t overwhelm the wall.

Add to that the fact that the S8 MaxV Ultra comes in white, as well as black, and you have a charging station that doesn’t loudly declare its presence. It is a very modern design though, reminiscent of a high gloss kitchen, so it might look a little peculiar if you have cottage-style interior décor.

The two 100ml tanks for the water – clean and dirty – sit on top of the station. They have lift-up handles, a bit like a milk pail, so you can lift them out. The tank lids clip into place at the front. Underneath these tanks is the gloss panel that houses the dust bag and the 580ml detergent dispenser.

Below this panel is the tray where the robot docks and connects with the charging ports, dust suction and mop washing and drying features. Your power cable is at the back.

The RockDock,as you might expect, features auto-dust emptying – both during and after clean-ups – and can go up to seven weeks before you need to change the bag in the station. You also get hot water mop washing, auto-detergent dispensing, auto tank-refilling. Plus, the dock self-cleans, and the mop and dock base dries at 60C to prevent mould growth and smells.

Roborock also says that the S8 MaxV Ultra charges up to 30% faster and will charge at off-peak times.

The robot itself is 35cm in diameter and 10cm high. On top is the LiDAR unit and three buttons: mop only/child lock, power/clean, and dock. A magnetic top cover also lifts off the top to reveal the dustbin and the QR code, and the Wi-Fi reset button.

The bottom of the robot has the flexible side brush, which swings out on a lever arm, and a mopping wheel that mops close the edges of the room. It also hosts the mopping VibraRise module with a microfibre mop cloth. The cliff sensors and carpet sensors are there too, and the main corkscrew DuoRoller Riser Brushes, made of out of soft rubber. These rubber brushes are an unusual design, as most robot vacuums have a typical bristle brush.

You also get a user manual, a voice control card, the safety guidelines, and one of the largest quick start guides we have ever seen.

Set-up and mapping

Here’s how to get started. Unpack the robot and station, removing all the shipping foam, and site the station. Then attach the dock base by pressing down both sides of the base until you hear a click. Plug the station in, fill the clean water tank, and remove the front panel to fill the detergent container if you wish. Power on the robot and place it in front of the dock and press the dock button, so the robot docks itself to charge.

At this point, scan the supplied QR code and download the Roborock app. Once the app is downloaded, open the app and tap the Scan to Connect button. The app will then take you through the connection process – you’ll need to scan the QR code on the top of the robot and enter your Wi-Fi password – and the procedure is very quick and simple.

Once your robot is connected to the app, it will ask you to create a quick map. Roborock states that LiDAR navigation in the S8 MaxV Ultra gives you up to six times faster floor mapping. We certainly found this robot to be very efficient at creating the map, which was very accurate. You can also create more than one map with the multilevel mapping feature.

The map identifies rooms based on the objects it finds in them, and you can edit room settings. The robot will also identify the floor type and the lay of the floor. It recognises large tiles from smaller tiles and carpet, as the robot will mop according to the lay of the floor. You can also set floor types in the map editing feature, as well as identify pieces of furniture and set no-go zones.

You can also choose to stay within a 2D map or convert to a 3D map, complete with furniture items shown in 3D.

Vacuuming

There’s a lot going with the S8 MaxV Ultra. It has 10,000 Pa suction power and corner-to-edge cleaning with the flexi-arm side brush that automatically extends when it detects corners or low areas under furniture. The DuoRoller Riser brushes scrape the surface of your floors to give a deeper clean.

You can choose from a variety of vacuuming settings. Suction power has four settings: quiet, balanced, turbo, max or max+, and you can set the vacuum to clean once or twice over and set the route to either a standard zig zag or a fast mode. You can also set the sequence of rooms, or you can choose the smart setting, which sets the room cleaning sequence by room types.

You can also set the robot to vacuum the full floor, a series of rooms, a defined zone, or to run a routine. There are several pre-programmed routines: a full vacuum followed by full mopping, an “after meals” routine that does the kitchen and dining room, a deep cleaning, an intensive sweeping, and a Deep+, which is a through cleaning of deep stains without vacuuming.

Great in theory. What about in practice?

In our testing, we ended up with perfectly dustless floors: be they tile, wood, laminate, or carpet. We began our testing on a turbo setting, and there was nothing left on the floor whatsoever.

In terms of the flour test, we found that the V8 MaxV Ultra needed to go over the affected area twice to pick all the flour up – this is fairly usual. It did track some of the flour on the wheels the first time round though.

The Roborock also has a CarpetBoost+ system, which detects carpet and has a 99.5% hair pick-up rate.

Not only that, but the V8 MaxV Ultra has Reactive AI 2.0 Obstacle Recognition, which identifies and then populates your map with obstacles it discovers as it cleans, representing them as small icons – it can recognise up to 73 objects specifically, such as shoes, cables, and floor mirrors.

The robot will also give you smart suggestions for no-go zones and entrapping thresholds, so the robot knows to move through door thresholds and over low-rise steps without cleaning – this means that it doesn’t struggle to get over small differences in floor levels. In our case, it consistently crossed a small step of 2.5 cm that usually foils most robot vacuums.

Again, the robot can recognise pets and stop the main brushes in their vicinity, while also boosting suction power around pet supplies, and Roborock says you get roughly 180 minutes of runtime on quiet mode.

In terms of noise, the quiet setting is very much a trundling mode, with just the wheel motion creating noise – roughly 30db. The max+ setting reminded us of a hairdryer, so we would say roughly between 80-90db, and the intervening settings fall at various equal points between the two.

Mopping

The V8 MaxV Ultra has an unusual way of mopping. The mop pads don’t wipe, they don’t spin; instead, the double modules vibrate 4000 per minute. Roborock calls this the VibraRise 3.0 Sonic Mopping system.

It also features an Edgewise mop module, a small side mop that rotates at 185rpm, and will get closer than 1.68mm to the edges of your rooms.

There’s choice of four scrub intensities and water flows: mild, standard, intense, and extreme. You can also choose to clean once or twice, and you have four choices of route: fast, standard, deep (a tighter Z-shape across the room) and Deep+, which is a slower and more battery intensive route across a floor.

All you do is set the robot to either mop, or vac and mop, the robot fills automatically and sets off on its own.

We did our initial test at an intense setting – which left a noticeable dampness to the floor in its wake – and were blown away. After the mop, our hard floors were immaculate. But it was more than that. The finish on a stretch of hallway tiles was magnificent – the best I’ve ever seen from a robot mop, and indeed a better finish than that from a steam mop, or conventional hot water and manual mop combination.

We can’t figure out whether the S8 MaxV Ultra somehow removed detergent previous cleans has left on the floor, or it simply cleans without leaving a film in its wake.

Over the fortnight that we tested the V8 MaxV Ultra, we were consistently impressed by the finish of the floors. It doesn’t bring up ingrained low-level staining, say, in the dimpling on a vinyl floor, but it certainly removes any kind of dirt, water mark, footprint, or dried liquid.

The robot also features intelligent dirt detection, which re-washes the mops until they’re clean, as well as re-mopping dirty areas. Once it has finished mopping, it will wash the mop and dry it at the Rock Dock, and self-clean the dock itself.

If you choose the vac & mop setting, the robot will lift the mop up to 2cm above the ground while it vacuums the carpet; one thing to note is that you won’t get the most intensive cleaning with this setting. We found that a full vac and mop of 41m2 took about 49 minutes, and this ratio – roughly a minute per metre2 – held throughout the testing period.

There are plenty of other additional features to explore. One we particularly liked was “SmartPlan”, which allows AI to choose how and what to clean in your home. Of course, the app will provide a cleaning history and a choice of collision modes, which allow you to set the level of object avoidance during a clean.

The app also has two launcher widgets, and works with Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and Apple Smart Watch. However, the S8 MaxV Ultra also has a built-in intelligent voice assistant, so you can talk to the appliance directly if you have lost your network connection, waking it up with the phrase “Hello Rocky” – Roborock gives you a card with the additional commands to use.

There is, of course, a child lock, and the privacy complies with ETSI EN 303 645 cyber security regulations.

You can also enable video calls and cruising to check on pets and take pet snaps, if that kind of thing floats your boat.

Price and Availability

The S8 MaxV Ultra with RockDock is available in the US for $1,799.99. You can buy it direct from Roborock or from Amazon.

It has not yet officially launched in the UK but you can currently buy it from Sotel.de and have it shipped over. It’s priced at around £1,513.21.

While we found the S8 MaxV Ultra to be close to flawless, you can get the same feature set for less if you buy the Ecovacs Deebot T30 Omni Pro.

To see more of our recommendations and find out how the S8 MaxV Ultra compares, have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested.

Should you buy the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra?

The S8 MaxV Ultra is one of the best mopping robot vacuums we’ve tested. The mapping is excellent, the object recognition is extraordinary, and it doesn’t strain to cross low level height differences.

Most of all, the mopping finish is phenomenal. We’d argue that you’ll struggle to get the kind of finish the S8 MaxV Ultra gives you on a somewhat dirty floor using a mop and bucket.

We highly recommend this robot vacuum and mop, although you may want to wait for it to come down in price before you buy.