Roborock Q5+ Robotic Pet Vacuum Review: Powerful and Pet Parent-Approved

Have you heard of the Roborock pet vacuum? We all love our pets like our children, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a few pet peeves when it comes to our furry family members. Perhaps the most common complaint of all is that their fur gets everywhere! Whether you’re sitting on the couch or playing with your pup or kitty on the floor, you invariably end up covered with unwanted cat or dog hair.  

While lint rollers and brushes can help handle some of this hair, the most efficient way to clean up dog and cat hair at home is with a pet hair vacuum. Not only can this help eliminate flyaway fur, it can also help rid your home of dangerous allergens like pet dander. 

With so many pet hair vacuums on the market these days, finding the best option can be a challenge. Not to worry…We took a look at a variety of pet hair vacuums to find one that could stand up to even the heaviest shedders. 

We wanted a vacuum that could clear both hardwood floors and carpets of lingering pet hair, one that was easy to use and effective against all kinds of household dust, dirt, and contaminant, and, ideally, one that required next to no effort on our end. 

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We landed on the Roborock Q5+ Robotic Pet Vacuum, a super-powerful and programmable robot vacuum that excels at eliminating pet hair and cleaning your home, freeing you up to spend more quality time with your pet. Here’s what we discovered.

What is Roborock?

The Roborock company was launched in 2014 by founder and CEO Richard Chang, a robotics expert who was frustrated to find that the robot vacuums on the market never lived up to his expectations. So he set out to build the smartest robot vacuum the world had ever seen. 

Just two years later, Roborock launched its first robot vacuum, which quickly became the best-selling robotic cleaner in the nation. Since then, the company has continued to innovate, launching model after model and winning multiple design awards. 

In the past five years, Roborock has sold over 10.8 million robot units worldwide. And just last year, the Roborock S7 robot vacuum and mop was recognized as one of the Best Inventions of 2021 by Time magazine. 

All About the Roborock Q5+ Robotic Pet Vacuum

The Roborock model I tested is the Q5+ robot vacuum. It’s a cordless robotic vacuum that looks like many other robot vacuums—round and low-to-the-ground. And though it’s chock-full of powerful cleaning technology, it looks pretty simple and easy to operate from the outside.

It features just two buttons—a home button and a power button—so there’s not a lot of guesswork about how to get it going. Once charged, a quick push of the power button will turn the Q5+ on and off. A longer press of the same button will launch a full cleaning cycle. Pushing the home button sends the robot vacuum back to the loading dock. Or, with a longer press, you can also do some spot cleaning. 

While you can control even more functionality using the Roborock app for your phone, it’s nice to be able to start cleaning with a simple push of a button if you are in a hurry. 

Smart Navigation System

Compared to other robot vacuums we’ve tried, the Roborock Q5+ is a step up for our household, largely due to a feature the company calls “intelligent LiDAR navigation.” What this means is that the robot vacuum can self-clean, using sensors to scan an area and map out the most effective way to pick up everything from small micro-debris particles and invisible allergens to dirt, dust, cat and dog hair, and more.  

Auto-Empty Dock Pure

The Roborock Q5+ works fast and comes with many helpful extras that make life easier for pet parents. For example, it has an Auto-Empty Dock Pure, so there’s no need to empty the robot vacuum after every cleaning. When the cleaning cycle is done, the robot simply returns to the dock and everything it picked up is sucked into an oversized bin, where it’s collected in a dust bag.

We loved this feature, which is helpful if you suffer from pet allergies and don’t want to handle dust, fur, and allergens every time you vacuum. The auto-empty function works for up to 7 weeks before you have to change the bag. 

Even then, all you have to do is simply switch out the bag…no mess, and no fuss. The dust bag itself acts as a clean-air filter, designed to trap particles as small as 0.3 microns inside…another nice plus when it comes to keeping the air in your home clean.

Cleans Carpets and Hardwood Floors

The Roborock Q5+ is intelligently designed so it can clean both hardwood floors and carpet effectively…and even switch back and forth between them. It features a multi-plane floating brush that adapts to the surface height to give you the best results.  

This floating brush is thick and durable, and it’s built to prevent tangles of hair and fur from clogging up the machine when it picks up dog and cat hair. The super-powered suction does a great job on both mid and low-level carpets, particularly for cleaning lingering dust from deep within the fibers.

How Easy Is The Roborock Q5+ Robot Vacuum To Set Up?

While the Q5+ does have easy push-button controls right on the vacuum, to take full advantage of all this robot vacuum’s features you’ll need to do some setup. You don’t have to be super tech-savvy, but it will take you a bit of time, so plan accordingly.

First, you have to set up the docking station so the Q5+ can get fully charged. While that’s happening, you can download the Roborock app (available for iOS and Android), which allows you to control the robot from your phone. After that, you’ll need to set up an account, connect the robot to your WiFi network, then add it to your account. 

If all that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. The app does a great job of walking you through each step.

Once you’re all registered, connected, and your robot vacuum is fully charged, it’s (almost) time for the fun to begin. Before your robot does any actual vacuuming, it needs to do a test run so it can map out the area using that LiDar navigation system. While this sounds a little tedious, it is pretty quick and can be set up in a few minutes.

Finally, it’s time to…set up the Auto-Empty Dock, of course. Again, this is fairly easy. All you have to do is attach two parts using the handy screwdriver Robock provides with your unit. Then just add the dust bag to the bin and remove the plate covering the air inlet to the dustbin so your robot can auto-empty. Now you’re all ready to sit back and watch the Roborocket Q5+ get to work!

Putting the Roborock Q5+ Robotic Pet Vacuum to the Test

While we only have one cat right now, it’s amazing how much cat hair gets all over the floor and carpet in our home. Before we tried out the Q5+, vacuuming felt like a losing battle. Five minutes after I was done, the floor would be covered in fur again. 

On Carpet

Vacuuming the cat hair with the Roborock Q5+ Robotic pet vacuum was super fast and surprisingly fun to watch. The robot did a great job on its maiden voyage. I had customized a map during setup, adding No-Go zones and invisible walls. And I was happy to see it followed my map to a tee.

What’s really cool about the Roborock app is that it includes a 3D map that can show you the robot’s progress in real-time. You can track where it’s cleaning, the size of the area, and how long it has been cleaning. 

Whether you customize a map or allow the Q5+ to map its own route, the robot cleans every inch of the area thoroughly and meticulously. First, it moves around the perimeter of the area, then it works in an overlapping S-shaped pattern. It’s smart enough to slow down when it is about to hit an obstacle, such as your sofa or anything in its way. It even approached one of my table chairs, cleaned just underneath it, and then backed away.

One nice feature you can engage on the Roborock Q5+ is the carpet boost function, which automatically increases the suction to maximum power whenever the unit senses it’s on carpet. 

With this feature engaged, the robot vacuum picked up tons of cat hair and even really small pieces of leftover litter trapped deep within the carpet, outperforming other robotic vacuums we’ve used.

On Hardwood

After that, we tested the robot on our hardwood floors. This is where the Roborock Q5+ truly excelled.  

Our hardwood floors accumulate plenty of cat hair, dust, and litter bits throughout the day. However, I never realized just how much until the Q5+ went to work. It picked up every last strand, fleck, and particle of debris. And because the mess is much more visible on a hardwood floor (whereas it tends to get camouflaged on carpet) the results we immediate and incredible.

It is so nice to know that we have a vacuum that we can run daily without any fuss or effort and keep the hardwood floors clean!  Especially since this is where we hang out most often (which, of course, means our cat does, too).

Next up: the kitchen floor. While our kitchen is small, the floor is often home to everything from crumbs and coffee grinds to leftover dry cat foot and (occasionally) caked-on bits of wet cat food. The Roborock cleaned it all in under 2 minutes. While there was a little dry food left at the edges of the kitchen, almost underneath the refrigerator, we were still amazed (and maybe a little bit appalled) by just how much the Q5+ picked up.

Key Features of the Roborock Q5+

• Powerful 2700 Pa suction vacuum
• Up to three hours of running time
• 2.5L dustbin and clean air filter (huge!)
• Auto-empty dock holds up to 7 weeks’ worth of debris
• Dust bag filter traps 99.7% of pollen as small as 0.3 microns
• Schedule cleaning through voice control supported app
• Compatible with Alexa

Things We Like

• As robotic pet vacuums go, this is the best one we’ve tried – great, thorough cleaning.
• Saves us time in the day because we can do work and vacuum at the same time.
• Picked up litter and granules that other pet vacuums didn’t.
• The Q5+ LiDAR navigation system is truly impressive, requiring almost no human intervention.
• Our place can get cleaned in under ten minutes (unsupervised).
• It is a really quiet robotic vacuum – and efficient.
• It doesn’t get stuck like other robotic vacuums we’ve used.

Things to Consider

• The app takes a little time to set up and get it right and map out.
• It is an expensive vacuum if you are on a tight budget but cheaper than other robotic vacuums.
• It doesn’t clean your couches or chairs.

Roborock Q5+ Robotic Pet Vacuum: Our Verdict

If you are looking for a robotic pet vacuum, the Roborock Q5+ Robotic pet vacuum is the best on the market!  Once you have it set up, you can relax while the Q5+ cleans your home quickly and efficiently. You can even activate it using voice controls through Amazon’s Alexa.

For anyone who struggles with an excess of cat fur, kitty litter, and all the other mess that comes along with our lovely pets, that’s a huge win.

Plus, the fact that the Q5+ can do this all automatically and unsupervised while we do something else saves us so much time. The Q5+ isn’t exactly inexpensive. But the time we’ve saved more than makes up for the investment!