Here’s the one robot vacuum I wish was coming to the US (and what to buy instead)

The DJI Romo just launched in the U.K., where I live, and I’ve been testing it out for several months now. And I gotta say, I love it. I’m no stranger to the best robot vacuums — my team tests a lot of them in our U.K. testing lab, and I’ve had to set up and use many of them before.

The Romo P has really got to me though. It’s the first robot vacuum I’ve liked enough to actually take home and clean with regularly. It blends powerful performance with a (typically-DJI) slick and feature-stuffed application. It looks brilliant, too (although its design is pretty divisive). And with the likes of Shark, Roborock and Dreame, now would’ve been a great time for a new player to enter the arena in the States.

Key point: “would’ve”. See, there’s a pretty big catch, making this robot vacuum bittersweet. Here's why.

The sweet: What I love

Firstly, I’ll cover what I love about this robot vacuum. I mean it when I say DJI has made a killer product here. For a first foray into robot vacuums, or cleaning devices in general for that matter, this is an amazing start.

The DJI Romo P costs £1,299 / AU$2,299.

Decent vacuuming capabilities

Obviously, the most important aspect to consider is how well this thing can clean. And happily the answer is: pretty well. My home’s first floor (that’s the ground floor in the U.K.) is a combination of oak flooring and medium-pile carpet. And overall, the Romo did a pretty good job of cleaning it.

I have two dogs, and the Romo P has experienced no issues vacuuming up most of their hair and dander from our hard flooring, even as they both started shedding when the weather warmed up in early April. Throughout the winter months, the Romo was also able to sweep up the debris they brought in from our yard, plus general day-to-day dust and dirt.

I’ve been impressed with how the Romo handles carpet, too. It cleaned my lounge carpets of dog hair with ease, and left super satisfying vacuum marks across the pile — kinda like a freshly mowed tennis pitch. That’s 25,000Pa suction for you (i.e., pretty powerful)!

Admittedly, it doesn’t do a great job of edges and corners, and dirt sometimes gets missed. See, the Romo uses plastic spinning fingers (we’ve named ours “Sal”, short for “Salad Fingers” — my fellow millennials will relate), which don’t quite get into the corners well enough. They’re also a little weak — you can watch debris get missed in real time, instead of being pushed into the suction path.

While the corner performance necessitates pulling out your main vacuum (in my case the fantastic Dreame Z30), the latter is easily solved by simply telling the vacuum to use higher power and repeat areas up to two more times. This uses more battery, but after two loops on high power of my full downstairs, Sal has always kept enough juice to mop afterwards.

An impressive mopper

My dogs constantly walk mud into the house through the winter months. In North East Somerset, near Bath U.K., where I live, the soil is red clay. That meant red-brown paw prints and smears everywhere. The Romo P is a thorough mopper. It uses two circular pads, a cleaning solution and a deoderizing solution — that means you can set it to wash, deoderize and then rinse floors, for a truly thorough clean.

It’s hands-free, too. The base station hosts a dirty water tank and bag, which the vacuum self empties into. It also heats, rinses and cleans its own mop pads, so there’s no dirty work for you to do.

Fantastic mapping and obstacle avoidance

Also key to the Romo P’s performance are the mapping and obstacle avoidance. Mapping is super easy, very thorough, and highly accurate. The Romo detected all the obstacles in my lower floor on its first map.

Mapping and behavior aren’t necessarily the same thing though. Some vacuums, like the Roborock Q10 S5+, map just fine, then still decide to bounce into every obstacle they encounter. The Romo has got stuck a few times under my sofa, which bows downwards when people are sitting on it, trapping the vac, but has otherwise never knocked a skirting board, never nudged a chair leg, and never bumped a sleeping dog’s nose.

It has no issues adjusting in real time to new changing obstacles, returning later to check whether it can vacuum those areas, and simply leaving them out if necessary. Like I said earlier, this is something even established brands struggle with.

For DJI to nail the obstacle detection and avoidance first time out? It’s impressive. Although not surprising given the obstacle avoidance systems the brand is well-regarded for in its drones.

There’s also the super-fun ability to remote control the Romo P and even broadcast your voice through the speaker — I can use this to tell my greyhounds to get the hell out of the way (not that they ever listen).

The remote control function is only for manoeuvring specifically around obstacles though, as you can’t vacuum while doing so. Given how good the mapping and avoidance are, it’s pretty pointless after the novelty has worn off.

Feature-packed app

Robot vacuums are nothing without strong applications to interface with the user. Again, DJI has flexed its full tech-giant might here and produced a slick, comprehensive companion application, first time around, no sweat.

The DJI Home app was a little janky on the early access software I started testing with. But after a few updates, it’s typical DJI: super polished. You use the app to set routes and maps, customize cleaning routines, set auto-clean times, check consumables, and more. It has everything I could ask for from a companion app.

Neo-retro styling

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Finally, there’s the design. Now, almost everyone I’ve talked to thinks this thing is ugly as hell. And I’ll admit, it isn’t one for traditionalists. But I love it. The white, see-through design is full neo-noughties-retro, and I’m there for it. It’s like a Nothing Phone and an Apple iMac G3 met up in Cyberpunk 2077 and had a baby.

The bitter: What I don't love

There aren’t that many downsides to the DJI Romo P. Sure, its corner performance isn’t the best and admittedly it’s very pricey. You can pick up the equally excellent (and oh-so-catchily-named) Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch for £300 less. That’s about it, though.

In the U.K. and worldwide markets, I anticipated a shortage of third party consumable replacements. After all, DJI is a new player in this game, so I expected to be without the large ecosystem of third party accessories you can buy for well-established rivals, like Dreame and Shark.

And, to be fair, the options are (only-very-slightly) limited. The Romo has been available in worldwide markets for long enough to have a respectable roster of third party accessories available on Amazon, like bags, mop heads and rollers.

Annoyingly, though, the Romo uses proprietary-shaped bottles of cleaning solution, rather than a solution refillable tank. That means options for replacement cleaning solutions are limited.

No U.S. availability for now

Alas, if you know anything about DJI right now, you’ll know it isn’t having much fun in the U.S. thanks to the application of tariffs and an ongoing feud with the Federal government over its drones. As such, the Chinese manufacturer has effectively stopped releasing most of its new products “officially” to the American market.

I say “officially” because many of them, like the DJI Osmo Action 6, are still available in the U.S. via third parties like Amazon. I was hoping for the same to be true for the Romo P. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

And it’s a huge shame. I love this robot vacuum, and I would love to recommend it to our Tom’s Guide U.S. readership. But given I write mostly for a U.S. audience, that can’t happen.

If you’re outside the U.S., the top-tier, vacuum/mop-cable DJI Romo P costs £1,299 / AU$2,299. The lower-tier versions are cheaper. There's the DJI Romo A, which costs £1,049 / AU$1,899, and features an opaque base station (but a see-through robot) and no deodorizer tank. And the Romo S, which costs £929 / AU$1,599 and features an opaque base station and robot, plus no deodorizer tank.

United States: What to buy instead

Don’t fear, though, there are plenty of amazing robot vacuums out there for you to buy in the States. The Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 costs $999 and is our favorite robot vacuum/mop. Its beefier sibling, the Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch, features similar hands-free maintenance and heated mopping, but for $1,199 (this would be my choice). There’s also the Ecovacs Deebot T30, which scored a fantastic 4-star rating in our review, although costs $1,300 — for that money, I’d buy the Shark.

For a cheaper alternative, check out the $999 Eufy E28 or $899 Eufy E25 (basically the same as the E28, minus spot cleaning) or the $499 Dreame L10S Ultra Gen 2. Whatever you choose, enjoy your spring cleaning!

Have I missed any criteria from the poll? Let me know in the comments.

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