Airrobo T10+ review: Stacked with features at a very low price

The Airrobo T10+ carves a new path through our robot vacuum cleaner expectations. Most models tend to be either loaded with features for a high price, or more affordable but missing certain features or technologies. However, despite costing less than £400, the feature list of the T10+ reads like it ought to cost well over £500.

It’s self emptying, comes with LiDAR navigation, has smart speaker integration and a mop attachment: a recipe for a well-earned Recommended award.

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Airrobo T10+ review: What do you get for the money?

There’s nothing in the Airrobo T10+’s box that’s particularly suprising. The robot itself is a familiar puck shape, with a diameter of 348mm and a LiDAR turret extending out of the top taking the overall height to 98mm. That’s a little too tall to fit under the low shelf of my coffee table, although it managed to navigate under every other item of furniture in my house that has a reasonable clearance.

It uses a combination collection bin and water reserve for the mopping function, although you need to attach a secondary cloth plate to the underside if you want the robot to mop as well as vacuum. It also comes with a simple remote control (an off-the-shelf unit, we suspect, as it’s identical to the one that comes with the £500 Proscenic M8 Pro), although I didn’t find any reason to resort to it as it doesn’t do anything you can’t do better with the accompanying smartphone app.

The self-emptying charge station is reasonably compact and also very similar in size (259 x 208 x 348mm, WDH) and shape to one that comes with the Proscenic M8 Pro.

When it’s finished a job, the robot backs up to the charging station, so its metal contacts touch and it can start replenishing its battery. This also aligns a tube on the charging station with an exit port in the robot’s collection bin, and engages a secondary vacuum that sucks out the contents of the collection bin into a bag inside the station. The bag has a capacity of 3.3 litres, so will empty the 250ml collection bin several times over.

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Airrobo T10+ review: What is it like to use?

The Airrobo T10+ is controlled using a smartphone app but it isn’t one that’s been designed specifically for the purpose. Instead it piggy-backs on the third-party Tuya smart home app. I was a little worried by this initially but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised.

Setup is simple enough and once you’ve connected the robot to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, you’re dropped straight into the vacuum controller, which suggests you simply set the device off and let it start making a map.

When you do this, the LiDAR kicks in immediately, scanning the robot’s surroundings as far as it can see. Because it builds up this map well before it’s visited any of the areas it’s mapping, it means you can immediately start to edit the map, dropping in no-go zones to protect your cable nests or any other locations you think the robot might struggle with. This is the sort of stuff you’d expect of a well-designed app from a dedicated and invested developer, yet here it is in an apparently third-party app.

It’s not without its niggles, though. For example, it didn’t hold on to all the room names I entered manually. This is minor – it doesn’t really matter if my kitchen is labelled ‘kitchen’ or ‘room 06’ but if I’ve bothered to make the change I would expect it to stick. That wasn’t always the case with the Tuya app.

The other niggles are mostly translation problems. Selecting how frequently the bin is emptied, for example, comes under a setting titled “Dust collecting treasure”, while switching to an alternative map if you want the vacuum to clean a different floor requires that you tap an option labelled “Reset the map”, which might put people off. There were occasions when Chinese slipped through, too, such as the screen where you choose which rooms to set the robot cleaning.

This is arguably the worst of the robot’s few failings, though. Everything else about the app works smoothly and exceeded my expectations. Once you’ve been through a bit of trial and error, it’s straightforward to explore its many options, from scheduling automatic cleaning to switching the map over for cleaning a different storey.

It’s worth noting, however, that I found the smart speaker integration lacking. I was able to connect the device to my Google Home but, although I could perform basic voice commands to start or finish a clean, I couldn’t control it to the extent of making it clean a specific room. The iRobot Roomba j7 is much better at this sort of thing but it ought to be considering it’s much more expensive.

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Airrobo T10+ review: Is it good at finding its way around?

The Airrobo T10+ uses its map extremely well. Drop a pin on the map for a spot clean and the robot goes right to that spot, circumnavigating permanent obstacles and negotiating tricky floorplans, even when it needs to slide through doorways and perform turns to get to its destination.

When it comes to avoiding obstacles, the T10+ is reasonably gentle around furniture and it avoided everything during its manoeuvres without getting sturck, even those with irregular angles that have previously caught rival robots out.

However, it doesn’t have the ability to detect socks, cables and pet mess that the iRobot Roomba j7 has, so if you’re going to use the robot on a schedule, you’ll need to keep your floor clear.

When it comes to cleaning patterns, the robot tackles areas intelligently. When it’s first finding its way around, it sections off rooms into zones, making a perimeter and filling in the gaps. Once it has completed its first sweep, however, it splits rooms up automatically and cleans an entire room in one go.

You can watch its progress from the app, where the cleaning path is clearly displayed on the map. If it hits an obstacle it can’t get around it tends to turn back, which can leave an uncleaned space behind it. However, it will fill in these spaces afterwards before it moves on to the next section. It’s a thorough and efficient system.

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Airrobo T10+ review: How well does it clean?

To test the cleaning ability of the Airrobo T10+ I ran it through our usual suite of tests. Starting with a 50g spillage of uncooked rice on a hard floor, I used the app’s spot clean tool to get the robot to the spillage. It squares off the perimeter around the spill, vacuuming as it goes, then covers the area inside with a series of perpendicular passes.

This proved very effective. Although there was a bit of scatter and a few grains left visible at the end, it collected a full 50g from our spill. On carpet it didn’t fare as well but still did a reasonable job, gathering 43g of rice. A second pass retrieved most of the rest of the grains.

Flour is a tougher job. On hard floor, the vacuum collected 38g of a 50g spill. There was a significant residue left behind and it travelled through some of the flour before collecting it, which was transferred onto its wheels and spread around the floor. It proved worse on carpet, only gathering 17g of the 50g spill, with a lot of visible flour spread well beyond the area covered by the original spill.

Overall, it collected 74 percent of the materials we spilled, which is only slightly behind the 76% collected by the Proscenic M8 Pro. However, it’s a significant way behind the best robot vacuums around, with the Roomba j7 collecting over 80%, the very affordable Eufy Robovac G20 collecting over 90%, and the AEG RX9.2 achieving a near perfect 96%.

Mopping is performed by attaching a plate to the bottom of the collection bin, and filling it with clean water from the tap. The plate has a removable cloth velcroed to the bottom and a small pump transfers water from the collection bin onto the cloth. This is then dragged around behind the vacuum, wiping as it goes.

This is fine for rooms that are entirely hard floor but managing where you want mopping and where you want vacuuming is more problematic and has to be done manually. This is very much a quick wipe, too. It might lift off a fresh splatter of dirt but it doesn’t have the elbow grease to lift dried-on or sticky dirt.

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Airrobo T10+ review: Should I buy it?

While the Airrobo T10+ isn’t the perfect robot vacuum cleaner it packs in a lot for the price, with LiDAR navigation, a mop attachment and a self-emptying charging station. Until recently, we’d only expect to see these kinds of options on the most expensive models, but here Airrobo has crammed them into a package that doesn’t tip past the £400 mark.

It’s certainly great value. When we reviewed the Proscenic M8 Pro it seemed like a good deal at its launch price of £500 but the similarly appointed Airrobo T10+ shaves another £100 off the price. It also works around one of the weakest elements of the M8 Pro, which is that its app won’t save more than one map for multi-storey cleaning. There’s no such problem for the T10+.

It doesn’t compete with some of its rivals when it comes to raw cleaning skill, with the likes of the Eufy Robovac G20 and the AEG RX9.2 proving better at cleaning spills in our tests. However, neither of these robots can also follow up with a floor mop, and you’ll need to empty them manually. Also, our tests are tougher than the average job your robot is likely to need to handle and, in general use, I saw little to suggest the T10+ couldn’t cope perfectly well with everyday cleaning.

Its navigation skills are excellent but, likewise, it doesn’t compete with the best. We love the way the AEG RX9.2 is gentle around furniture, and the iRobot Roomba j7’s ability to spot and avoid random mess is second to none. Both are significantly more expensive, though.

Overall, then, the Airrobo T10+ is a great buy. It gets a lot of things right, with only a few niggles that stop it achieving a five star rating. However, it’s the low price that is the winning factor here. If you only have £400 to spend on your next robot vacuum cleaner, you get a lot of good stuff for your money with the Airrobo T10+.