Roborock S6: the best robot vacuum for hard floors, long hair and messy kids

2025 update: The robot is now 7 years old and we still use it every few days. It has held up fabulously with minimal maintenance and no serious problems. The model in this article has since been replaced by the “S7” model.

TL;DR: It’s a great vacuum and it’s still working hard for us 7 years after I originally wrote this post in 2019. It’s hands-off and easy to use, rarely needs maintenance, and the only annoyance we’ve experienced was when we moved the dock and had to re-map the house.

(Roborock official site).

We picked this robot vac over the Roomba by iRobot because Roomba apparently just moves around at random and random movements annoy me. The Roborock first outlines your room and then vaccuums “line by line” just like a printer. You can predict its movement, so it’s not a total nuisance to be going about your business while it’s in operation.

Note: Like all products we review here on HomeUpgraded, our Roborock S6 vacuum is something we bought ourselves and have put through extensive use before writing about it. Everything in this article is our own research and opinions.

Roborock S6 features at a glance

The dustbin looks dinky compared to what we’re used to seeing on canister and upright vacs, but it’s large enough for a full sweep of our 2700 sq. ft home. We empty it between runs.

It takes about 110 minutes and most of a full battery to do our 2700 sq. ft. home, but we often just target specific zones/rooms with the app. I find this feature really convenient: I just open the app and draw a box somewhere in my house and the robot walks itself over and cleans it. We’ve never let it run on a schedule (there’s typically too many toys and other crap to pick up in preparation for a run).

See the Roborock S6 on Amazon.com

✔ Our floors are cleaner than they’ve ever been – and that’s saying something, with two messy children, my own long hair, and plenty of foot-traffic around the house. I love walking barefoot around my house again. Honestly, this thing raised the bar on cleanliness since it goes under things and into places I only scrubbed occasionally. I’m actually a little embarrassed because I thought I was doing a good job, but this vacuum finds everything.

✔ Run the vacuum from anywhere. You don’t have to be home! You can start the vacuum from anywhere you have an Internet connection. I usually run it when I’m away from home because I don’t want to be in its way, but it’s not a huge nuisance if you do run it while home.

✔ It fits in corners and goes under furniture. Let’s be honest, I rarely moved furniture or push things out of the way for vacuuming. Fortunately, Jeff has no problem gliding under our king-size bed, dining room chairs, or our bathroom vanity.

✔ Does not suck up drapes. We have long drapes that end just above the floor in multiple rooms. I used to tie them up or drape them over nearby furniture but Roborock just eats around them.

Roborock S6

✔ Works on hardwood, tile, and carpet. Our home is mostly hardwoods and tile, but we have a number of rugs of varying thicknesses and types. Jeff handles everything from our door mats to the oversize carpet samples we use in the children’s rooms. (We have not tried it on bath mats, we pick those up before running the vacuum.) It has not chewed any corners, left any rugs curled up, or otherwise bothered them. It mounts even our thickest rug (1/2″).

Roborock S6 Roborock works on our low-pile rug, switching between tile and rug as he traverses the room.

✔ Easy to empty and easy to clean the brush. I’ll go into detail more on this later but basically emptying out my upright vacuum always squicked me out because I had to reach into it and pull the globs of dust and out of the canister with my hand. I’m happy to say that the dust and dirt just falls out of the Roborock’s bin, and the brush is easy to snap in and out of place for the occasional de-hairing.

✔ Goodbye, tedious chore. With two small kids, sweeping and vacuuming was consuming a small part of my life. I was vacuuming and sweeping after every meal and snack and I was just really tired of it.

How it works: using the Roborock S6

Preparing to vacuum

We pick up any toys, laundry, shoes, cables, etc. from around the floors and then start the vacuum using the app. We don’t move furniture for it, but if you do, it’ll figure out the room has changed and adapt to the new layout.

Note: You can also carry the vacuum to the room you want it to vacuum and push a button on the vacuum to run it.

Using the Roborock app

The app is easy to use and lets more than one person “own” the vacuum and manage it via their own smartphones. This lets both my husband and I start, stop, or view the vacuum’s current progress.

You don’t have to be on your home WiFi to use the app or control the robot. To start the vacuum, open the app and tap “Enter robot” to see the current map of your home.

Here, you can pick rooms to vacuum, have it clean the whole house, or define a box-shaped area for it to vacuum. You can set no-go zones (shown here as red boxes) and partition rooms. You can also access settings and drop a “pin” to tell the vacuum to vacuum a particular location.

Roborock S6

Mapping

You’ll have to pick up your whole entire house for the initial mapping. Depending how cluttered your house is, this might be a challenge (it definitely was for us).

The good news is you only have to do this once, or at least until you move the dock, so try to put some thought into your initial dock location.

You can generate a new map at any time, and you can save up to 3 separate maps (I think the idea is to have one map per floor, but we live in a single-story house and haven’t experimented with having extra maps).

The app will try to figure out where your rooms are, but you’ll probably want to edit the room boundaries themselves. The app is a little finicky here and some rooms are not cut up the way I want them because the cut tool in the app isn’t perfect and doesn’t like when the end points of your slice tool are both outside your home. I find that I have to cut rooms up into little pieces and then merge them to get the boundaries exactly where I want them to be.

We’ve made extensive use of “no go” zones in the map - we don’t want the robot to go under the bathroom vanity or under the laundry cabinet.

In practice, I almost always use the vacuum to target a specific room or zone. Some of our rooms get dirty at like 10x the rate of other rooms.

Roborock S6 In this map, the Roborock S6 just returned to its dock (middle of the lilac-color room) after vacuuming our kitchen/dining/family room area. The red regions are “no go” zones I set up manually and saved. These are areas with lots of cables and hazards like toys.

The rooms don’t have to be adjacent to each other. When it’s finished, it plays a recorded announcement and returns to its dock.

The whole process is completely hands-free and can be monitored in real-time through the app.

Roborock S6 3 side-by-side screenshots from the Roborock app, showing how the robot first traces the room and then fills it in, going line-by-line and pivoting around the legs of chairs and tables.

You can use the app from anywhere you have an Internet connection. This means you can run the vacuum while you’re at work or out running errands, and I really enjoy coming back to finished floors.

Vacuuming

It’s not quiet, but it’s also not exceptionally loud. I wouldn’t watch TV with it in the room. Ours goes cu-clunk, cu-clunk as it passes over the grout between our large kitchen floor tiles, and it becomes noticeably louder when it’s working on carpet, but overall I would describe it as less noisy and intrusive than our upright vacuum.

It’s slower than I am with an upright vac, but it’s also way more thorough and fits into places I don’t.

When it’s done with the area(s) you assigned it to, it finds its dock and puts itself back on its charger. The whole process is very hands-off, but you do have to dump out the dust bin yourself.

The Roborock S6’s cleaning capabilities and maintenance are covered later in this review.

Roborock S6 Jeff finds his dock, lines up, and scoots into position for charging.

Cleaning capability

The Roborock S6 is great at cleaning. It’s definitely better than my most recent corded vac, and it’s about on par with my battery-powered Dyson. I held off on a robot vac for years because I figured it would be super weak but it’s way better than the $200ish corded vacs I owned for years.

Things it has picked up: glitter, small leaves, Cheerios, corn flakes, dried rice, dried Play-Doh pieces, crumbs under the table, dust galore, hair, and sometimes tiny toys (I pick these out of the dustbin myself).

Roborock S6 Our home has these wedge-shaped HVAC registers that our traditional upright vacuum cannot without using an attachment. The Roborock handles these corners with ease.

Roborock S6 The Roborock S6 vacuums somewhere I rarely did: under our IKEA Hemnes. (It also has no problem navigating around larger random things left on the floor, even if they weren’t there during the initial mapping.)

Mopping mode

The Roborock S6 comes with two reusable mop pads and several disposable mop pads. We’ve used it for mopping on a few occasions, but it’s not our primary use case for the vacuum. I’m picky about what fluids (and what quantity) I wash our hardwoods with so I mostly use the Roborock S6 for vacuuming and then mop it myself.

Rugs and irregular objects

Roborock S6 deserves special mention for how well it mounts the edge of rugs and doesn’t curl them or get stuck on the corners.

Our rugs include:

Roborock S6 Clockwise starting at top left: our children’s thin play rug, our service door utility mat, the oversize carpet sample in our daughter’s room, and a decorative rug in our living room. The Roborock S6 navigates all of these with ease.

Furniture

Tables and chairs - The Roborock S6 pivots around the legs of tables and chairs to get every last crumb from under the table. I love not having to move the chairs to vacuum. The vacuum has not damaged any furniture legs.

Beds - I didn’t fully appreciate the Roborock’s short stature until I realized it was going under our bed every time it vacuums our bedroom. Let’s just say I never vacuum under the bed. Now, the space under the bed is getting vacuumed all the time. I love it.

Kitchen cabinets - This is another place that tends to get really gross because it’s harder for me to clean it (or even see that it’s dirty). Jeff fits in the space under the cabinet faces and vacuums up every crumb from in front of the toe kick without scratching or damaging the wood.

Roborock S6

Things our robot vaccuum has eaten (or tried to eat)

I feel like the “hazardous item” size threshold is about that of a toddler sock. Anything smaller or shorter than a small sock and the Roborock S6 is either going to roll over it and try to suck it up or get trapped on it somehow.

Here is a list of things the vacuum has eaten (or tried to eat):

Phone charge cable - I found the robot vacuum trapped, unable to leave our room because my phone’s charge cable had wrapped around the brush and was holding it in place. It kept trying to turn around, run the length of the cord back to its source and then try to leave again, but the cord kept the robot tethered. It was stuck in a loop trying to free itself.

Sound machine cable - We set the robot vacuum loose in the baby’s room, forgetting about the white noise machine under her crib. The machine has a very fine, thin cord, which the vacuum pulled hard enough to unplug it from the wall and drag it a few feet from its starting position.

Toddler-size sock - The Roborock pushed this small sock around a bit but did not consume it.

Roborock S6

Puzzle piece - This foam puzzle piece gave the robot vacuum some trouble. The vacuum mounted it and switched to carpet mode in effort to suck it up. We were present and able to pause the robot and pull it out. The puzzle piece and the robot were both fine.

Roborock S6

Sheet of paper - A sheet of paper got wrinkled as the Roborock pushed it into the table legs but there was no damage to the vacuum.

Crayons - Another time, we found a half-chewed crayon that was had gotten worn down by the Roborock’s brushes. The vacuum itself was fine, but the crayon got some bristles embedded. Thankfully, the crayon didn’t get smeared all over the floor or anything like that.

Roborock S6 The Roborock ate a crayon 🙁 (He was fine)

This is basically why we don’t use the Timer (schedule) feature - our house is very ‘dynamic’ and we like to pick up all the toys and socks and other stuff from the floor before we run the vacuum.

What’s in the box?

The Roborock S6 comes with its dock, power cable, instruction manual, two reusable mop pads, a small stack of disposable mop pads, and a replacement air filter.

Roborock S6

Vacuum maintenance

Like any vacuum, the Roborock S6 needs periodic maintenance and part replacement. The app tracks the vacuum’s usage and suggests maintenance of various components every so often. Note that this isn’t based on the actual degradation of the components, just an assumption of their state after X hours of use.

As of 2025 we’re at 242 hours of run time. We’ve replaced the brush, filter, and spinny foot a couple times but it really doesn’t need much maintenance. We clean the sensors and the brush a few times per year.

Roborock S6 The Roborock S6 app’s Maintenance page displays the remaining life of various vacuum parts.

Replacement parts and accessories are inexpensive. They’re typically sold as a bundle on Amazon. You get multiples of each part (two brushes, six spinning feet, four filters, etc.) in the bundle. We’re still working through these supplies.

Roborock S6 replacement parts on Amazon.com

Emptying the dustbin

Emptying the canister on my upright vacuum was a disgusting experience: I often had to reach into the canister to loosen the jammed-up dust and hair wads using my fingers (barf).

So far, the Roborock has not made me touch much of the crud it picks up. It falls out of the dustbin with a few knocks against the inside of our trash can. I usually do pick through it a bit just to make sure no Barbie shoes or whatever got pulled in.

Roborock S6 I cannot believe how much crap this vacuum finds even though we run it every other day. We must have been living in absolute filth.

Cleaning the roller brush

We clean the brush maybe once per year, on average. Based on how much hair is on the floor of this house we must all be balding, and hair is the primary thing we pick out of the roller. I like how the Roborock brush is removable (you can lift it out of the vacuum and clean it somewhere convenient) because my previous vac made me get on the floor to do roller maintenance.

Roborock S6 Close up view of the main brush. You can remove the yellow cap to pull hair and string off the brush.

Washing the mopping pads

When it’s time to mop, you attach a mopping pad. There are disposable mop pads and reusable mop pads. We’ve only used the reusable mop pads so far. The mopping pads are supposedly machine washable but we have elected to hand wash ours.

Here’s a brand new pad vs. a pad after one mopping. You get two of these with the Roborock, so if you do a lot of mopping you could have one in use and one in the laundry.

Roborock S6 Roborock S6 reusable mop pads before and after one mopping session.

The bottom line

The Roborock S6 is a workhorse smart vacuum that keeps up with kids, long hair, and daily messes. It works on tiles, hardwood, and carpet, and manages the transitions with ease. Control it from anywhere with an easy-to-use app.

It took a daily chore I was sick of doing and turned it into something I could automate and have done when I wasn’t even home. Before we bought our Roborock vacuum we were considering a cleaning service, but we need near-daily vacuuming in this house and services tend to be bi-weekly. It’s been almost 7 years since we bought the vacuum and it’s still going strong.

Roborock s6 vacuum - amazon.com

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