Customer Ratings & Reviews

Shark AI Robot Vacuum R201/RV2001 This is my first experience with a robot vacuum and I have to say I am pretty impressed. I have existing Shark products in my house from a couple of stand up and one hand held one. So I expected the hardware to be pretty good in this respect, and I was correct. In opening the unit, I see extra brushes and filters that are welcomed! I didn’t expect it but it was a great surprise. After charging overnight, the next day I downloaded the recommended app to connect the robot to my wifi. After about 3 or 4 tries, I was able to connect my robot to the wifi. I am not sure why it took so many tries to connect. My other devices do not have issues. In looking at the robot I always try to go online to see if they have any updated documentation. To my surprise, this unit is not yet on the Shark website. So the hard copy of the quick start guide and manual are the only ones you get for now. I am sure they’ll update the model soon enough. The initial run was the listed exploratory run that created a rough draft of the house layout. The software asks if the map somewhat resembles and in the first try, this was done pretty well. I know we can assign rooms and zones, but those features are only active to be saved onto your map when the robot completes a copy. I ran my robot about 3 times and have not yet officially completely mapped the house yet. I have about a 1600 square foot layout and I am closing off all the bathrooms and bedrooms and focusing on the open layouts of the house. The second run was about 45 minutes and that completely filled up the tray with dust, cat fur and dander. My only negative at this point is that the “AI” sight is not great. It’s good, but not great. When the robot is cleaning the kitchen, the robot always without fail pushes my cats bowls around like it was looking for a black friday sale item. Not sure why, maybe because the bowls are too low profile? Not sure. I guess I can put a blockade there to let the robot map that out for now. The software is adequate. Because the robot needs to map it before zones can be set, this was a little annoying, but I understand the reasoning. The sound can be adjusted and that correlates to how strong you want the vacuum to be. For me, the normal setting is fine. It is noticeably louder on hard floors than carpet of course. We have two cats and two girls in the household. Me having a receding hairline but with the cats and girls in the house they will have hairs that are destined to be all over the place. So needless to say, the cup on this normal sized robot is way too small for our house, which is a smaller house compared to the neighborhood. I do wish this was the XL version that has the self cleaning part to empty out the robot between cleanings, but it is what it is. My minor gripes is that there is no real notification on when a complete map should be complete so that I can proceed to add my zones to the house. Without a complete map, none of my edits are saved. Other than that, this unit lives up to other Shark products I have. The quality is there. I just wish there was more support for this somewhere.

I love this Shark AI Robot Vacuum. It comes with all the bells and whistles that you want in a smart vacuum, but the bottom line still remains the same, how well does the vacuum pick up dirt and hair? This Shark Robot vacuum does a great job of getting rid of those 2 things from your floors. We have a cat that sheds a lot and this smart vacuum picks it all up. To begin with you will need to download the SharkClean app. Through the app you can schedule when you want your floors vacuumed, view the map to select your go-to zones and to select your vacuum modes. Once your vacuum has been charged, it will need to go on an explore run to create an interactive map in your app. I love that it can clean in rows to ensure that the high traffic areas have been cleaned. Second, the suction on this little guy is impressive. Another great feature on this robot vacuum is the self-cleaning brushroll. I specifically got this vacuum because we have a cat and my daughter has super long hair. I was tired of constantly having to unclog the brushroll with previous robot vacuums. With this Shark Robot vacuum, we know that our floors have been thoroughly cleaned. If you are in the market for a new robot vacuum, you need to put this Shark AI robot vacuum on your list.

It doesn't clean very well, especially if you have a pet. It also doesn't communicate with the WiFi in your home very well. It gets stuck just about every other cleaning. It also doesn't map the rooms very well. I ended up returning this model and ultimately went with the Roomba S9+. Night and day. Worth every penny.

Started the mapping process and it got jammed. It told me to clean brushes however, they were clean and it wouldn’t start again. Called to troubleshoot and the tech said they recommended taking it back as there was nothing they could do. It was a defective vacuum.

We have two dogs that shed constantly. We also have wall to wall ceramic tile so everything shows if we don't sweep or vacuum all the time. I joke that instead of snowdrifts we have hairdrifts. My wife and I (okay mostly my wife) are constantly sweeping so I have been thinking of a robot vacuum for a while. When I got the opportunity to try the Shark IQ Robot Vacuum I was pretty excited, hoping that it would cut down some of our daily sweeping routine and for the most part I'm not disappointed. I went through the initial setup with the smartphone app. We also moved any items on the floor that might hamper the operation of the vacuum. They recommend anything less than 2.8 inches tall be moved, including cables. Rugs can stay however but dog toys, dog bed pads, etc need to be collected while the vacuum makes its run. The vacuum did its mapping of the whole house and we continued to have issues with some of the rooms, mainly my work from home office which is pretty cluttered these days. With the smartphone app you can make adjustments to the map, you can set up sweep schedules, you can set quiet times making the whole system pretty versitile. The phone app will also send you notifications if there is a problem with the Shark. The first few days the Shark did a great job in the wide open areas but sometimes would hang on a few items that I just can't clear so I've deleted the map and today we'll let it run the map again but this time eliminate the areas that are possible problem areas. While my wife was pretty resistant to getting one of those gadgets she's taken a liking to the reduced sweeping effort with the Shark doing most of the daily grind however my biggest complaint is the dirt cup is just too small for us. My house is only 1500 sq ft and the Shark can't make the whole house in a single trip. The culprit is the dog hair, not the fault of the Robot but frustrating none the less. If I had to do it over again I'd get the Shark IQ Robot XL that has a self-emptying base. Oh... and it's loud but not as loud as a standard floor vacuum but you know when it's running for sure. It is pretty funny though when it gets quiet I go looking for the Robot to see if it got hung up on something (again it's still in the learning stage) or if it finished it's route and returned to base. All in all it does what it's supposed to do. Setup was simple and it's easy enough to make adjustments that will best suit your needs but if you have a pet that sheds constantly make the extra investment and get the XL. I'm sure with a couple of more tweaks we'll have the Shark IQ Robot humming along.

The accuracy to clean is poor. Is easy to set up and use.

Only had it less than a week. Came home and it would not start cleaning Tried to turn it off and back on, now it won’t come on at all

This Shark AI Robot vacuum is replacing an older model Shark robot vacuum that used a less advanced system of navigating our home. Very simple out-of-the-box set up, just get the app, connect to the robot and start cleaning! The Shark AI is a major step up in terms of manageability and efficiency that we greatly appreciate since we own two dogs and a cat. This model offers a self cleaning brushroll that does a great job of keeping animal hair from tightly wrapping around the brush and reducing cleaning ability. Our previous model would have us cleaning the brush roll nearly every time we wanted to use it, with the Shark AI we only cleaned it once in 15 runs and it really wasn’t even necessary! Another feature we are not accustomed to is the home mapping technology. Although not new to Shark robots, we did not have this function in our older model. The mapping feature allows me to set room names, adjust the cleaning area, group rooms together and most importantly, set the “no-go” zones. For us, we have one room where the threshold is just barely over the Shark AI’s ability to get over (though I have seen it navigate the threshold a few times) and not having to lay down a magnetic strip like we did with the old model just saves us that much time and heartache. The Shark AI also has 3 modes to choose from, ECO/Normal/Max. This is nice because at normal mode the robot is slightly louder than I expected, but I can switch it to run on ECO mode and get a quieter run and longer battery life. We typically run on Normal mode which easily handles our ground floor that is about 1500 sq ft. There is also a setting to have the robot adjust power when it senses carpet. Since we have area rugs throughout this is a great feature and works really well. To that end, the Shark AI also does clean and even straight lines on our carpet, where the old robot would do random zig zags. So far after about a month of owning the Shark AI we are very happy with our upgrade. There have been no issues and less manual interaction (helping the robot get unstuck, cleaning brushroll, etc.) than we had with the older Shark IQ model, so we are more carefree in automating the cleanings having faith that the robot will complete the task with great efficiency. Although a vacuum robot will never fully replace a traditional vacuum, the Shark AI certainly gives us a good piece of mind that our floors can stay well maintained in between those heavy vacuum days.

Stopped working after 4th run. Had to return. Did not buy another.

Compared to an older model robatic vacuum this one is much improved. The laser guidance does a really good of avoiding obstacles. It will spin several times when started to get a mapping of the room. It tranaitions from different carpet types and smooth floors easily. I have not had any issues with it going over rugs as well. It is a considerable amount louder than our old Shark vacuum, but it is not an issue with how well it works. There are two filters to make sure practically all dirt and dust is trapped. The dust bin feels up pretty fast and this proves how well it works, plus we have 4 cats and a dog. Not only does it beep, but the vacuum talks to inform of any issues.

I love Shark products and this robot vacuum definitely doesn't disappoint as far as how well it cleans. The app however does and that's where they loose one star with me. The constant errors when nothing has gone wrong, telling me to fill the fluid reservoir because it's empty (that's like adding blinker fluid to a car) and the slowness of the app is such a bummer. The lag reminds me of dial up internet. The other star loss is how lost the vacuum gets when trying to find the dock station. Day one it mapped the house and found the dock with zero issues. Sent it out to clean and it did great, vacuum's in a nice pattern instead of bouncing around like a damaged droid (like the old ones did) then eventually ran out of juice and returned to the dock with no issues. Now he runs right passed it, searches aimlessly throughout the house till the battery dies. The dock hasn't moved. Silly it knows every room in the house now and knows where it can and cannot go but still can't fine the dock. The vacuum itself though works great! It's much quieter than ones I've had in the past and a normal upright vacuum. We use our robot vac during the week and a normal vac on the weekend with a good mopping. Robot vacs aren't quite there to replace a upright vacuum but they do maintain the house till you can do a deep and thorough cleaning. If it doesn't start finding it's dock though it will be nothing more than useless droid parts. The app definitely needs improvement for this bot. Once these two items are resolved I will recommend this vacuum but for now I can't see doing that.

I've been using this Shark AI Robot Vacuum for a couple of weeks now and have put it through its paces. This is my first robot vac as I've typically avoided them due to the disappointing stories and reviews I've seen. After hearing about the AI mapping technology that a lot of the newer higher end models are coming with, I was excited to give this one a shot. Setting up this Shark vac was extremely easy. Placement is key. Make sure to place the dock in an unobstructed area against the wall. Preferably with 3-5ft of clearance on each of it's sides and also in the front of the dock. After doing this, I downloaded the "Shark Clean" app and followed the on-screen instructions. Make sure that your mobile device is connected to the same Wi-Fi network that the robot vac will connect to on the app. I love that this Shark Vac operates on the 2.4 Ghz band. With that said, make sure that your phone is connected to the 2.4Ghz SSID on your home Wi-Fi network when setting this up. While the 2.4Ghz band isn't as "clean" as the 5Ghz band, distance and object penetration (such as walls) is much better on the 2.4 Ghz band. Not once has my Shark Vac experienced any connectivity issues. Once the app detected my Shark vac, setup was complete. In terms of operation, I have been floored with it's performance. The "AI mapping" technology sounded like a gimmick but it truly works. My living room and bedrooms are all carpet. My laundry room, kitchen, and bathroom have tile flooring. I have a dining room table, several sofa end tables, a large 75 inch TV stand, several statue displays, air purifiers, etc in my living room that the shark vac has to maneuver around. For it's first use, the Shark vac will go on an "exploration" run in an attempt to map out your home for it's cleaning cycles. It got my home layout pretty spot-on on it's first try. As far as the cleaning, I was extremely surprised that it seems to do a better job than my stick vac. Sure, it takes longer, but the fact that you can schedule cleaning cycles on the app to initiate when you're not home offsets that for me. Another feature that extremely impressed me is it's ability to clean in the dark. When I read, "Day or Night: Night vision for consistent coverage, any time of day" on the packaging, I chuckled. Nothing more than marketing I thought. Sure enough, this thing cleans my laundry room and den in complete darkness with no issues. I've watched it do its round multiple times around my house and I'm extremely impressed at how accurate it's sensors are. It rarely runs into anything. This is not the experience that I've seen a lot of other users have on their YouTube reviews with older generation robot vacs. I'm also happy to report that everytime that I have manually triggered the Shark vac to clean from the app, it's never had a hiccup. It has also, not once, not been able to find it's way back to it's docking station. The battery life is also impressive. Usually, after a full clean cycle, it still has about 60-65% battery left. I never would have thought that my first robot vac experience would have been this effortless. Usually there is always some type of connectivity issue, a battery life issue, home mapping issues, or app issues with other robot vac reviews I've seen. I still can't really believe that I can't really find any cons to this unit. While it may not be able to reach the tiniest and most remote crevices of the house, this little droid will stroll around your house and clean up 98% of it! Highly recommended!

Review for Shark - Shark® AI Robot Vacuum R201 with Home Mapping, AI Laser Vision, Self‐Cleaning Brushroll, Wi‐Fi - Gray I’ve had a robot vacuum for the past four years and have gotten used to the things you need to do to get the most out of it. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find that things had improved in those four years! The Shark R201 has many things to recommend it: it’s much quieter, doesn’t bump into things in order to find its way around, learns the layout of space it’s cleaning and gets more efficient about it, and best of all, doesn’t need to be cleaned of pet fur after every use. I’ll start with that last one. We have a dog that leaves a fair amount of fur around the living room. The roller on the R201 is specially designed NOT to wind the fur around itself. I was skeptical of this claim, but was truly pleased to see that it’s true! No more daily cleaning of the rollers! In terms of quiet, I think there are two things that matter: the overall sound of the machine, which is certainly lower, but also the fact that it’s “laser vision” really works to keep it from bumping into things and making noise. “Home mapping” begins the first time you start the R201; it doesn’t clean, but instead, wanders your house learning the corners and crannies. The next time out, it does a cleaning and uses it’s internal map to do a more systematic job. Instead of wandering back and forth, like my old model, it goes up and down in rows - much like a lawnmower. The result is a more thorough cleaning. You can view the map and make changes to it. For example, you can name the rooms, correct spaces, and set off-limits areas - like the dog’s water dish. I have only a few quirks to list. One is the the setup on the app. Although the app is well designed and got me up and running quickly, it was clearly not tested on a variety of phones. Mine is a very popular, if slightly older iPhone and the app displayed so badly on it, that the text was unreadable. I had to guess at what the steps were for setup. Secondly, the “AI” seems to have some trouble with “cliffs,” that is, the tops of stairs. It’s smart enough to not fall down them, but hesitates to an extreme degree and spends several minutes navigating the three foot stretch. I thought this would improve with practice, but was disappointed to see it happen just the same everyday. I tried to find an answer on Shark support with no luck.

I had an older Shark robot vacuum that just went around for an hour doing the same areas again and again until it finished. This model - Shark AI Robot Vacuum R201 has to map out the house first so it shouldn't take as long to vacuum the floor in the future as it knows the layout of the rooms. On its first trip, it has to explore the house and store it in memory. I turned it on and off it went on its merry way. I looked in on it a while later and couldn't find it. It wedged itself under my treadmill. I took it out, put it on its charger, blocked the treadmill and started the exploration again. This time it got caught up on another piece of gym equipment so back to the charger it went. Third time it got caught on an angled chair leg so back again to the charger. On its fourth outing it finally mapped the room and went back to the charger. Yea! I opened it up to empty it and it was packed with dirt. I couldn't believe how much it picked up. It did a great job now that it knew the layout of the room. It uses an app on my iPhone that my previous Shark model didn't and through the app I am able to schedule the vacuuming sessions by day and time. The best part was I was able to add a skill to my Alexa so at any time I want it to vacuum, I just tell Alexa to use the Shark and vacuum the floor. Once I got over the initial frustration, it does a great job and I was happy with the upgrade.

The Shark AI robot vacuum is like having a little robot helper clean the house for you. The AI feature enables it to detect and avoid obstacles over 2.8” in height, which is great because I’m honestly a bit lazy and would rather just send it on a cleaning mission than organize the house to make it robot friendly first. You’ll still have to pick up your charging cables and anything small off the floor, but chairs, stools, fans, pets, etc… it’ll detect and move around them. It can also detect ledges too, so no worries about it falling down the stairs or an elevated edge, and no need for boundary strips either. It’s pretty fun watching it work its way around the house and I admire the determination it has climbing the 1.25” transition bump we have between the hallway and dining room. Outside of avoiding objects and ledges, another great feature of the AI is that it maps out the room and vacuums in straight lines versus “dumb” robot vacuums that just bump into everything to change directions. This makes a big difference if you have a carpet or rug where you can see the vacuum lines, but it also helps ensure a thorough cleaning on hard surfaces. Again, it’s fun watching it work as it seems to take multiple passes in each room, the first I think to evaluate the room and obstacles, and then it leaves and comes back right after to vacuum in straight lines. The waste bin is a good size, meaning you likely won’t have to empty it in the middle of a vacuum run, but it’s not a bad idea to empty it before every run. After the first vacuuming run, I was amazed by how much cat fur is apparently on my floors (it could’ve been a Wookie). Not that I don’t vacuum regularly, but this thing vacuums under the beds way more thoroughly and often than I do. The overall vacuum performance has been excellent, but I am having issues with the Shark app for it. If anything, the app is the main weakness of this vacuum as it’s a bit glitchy, can get unresponsive, and frequently has trouble displaying the map of my house for editing. What’s odd is that even though I can’t retrieve my map, I know it’s still in the robot’s memory because it vacuums according to the map guidelines and rooms that I listed. It just won’t display my map anymore for some reason, which is annoying to say the least. Thankfully, I can still do everything else like send it out to vacuum, which specific rooms, what vacuum power, and even schedule when. Resetting the memory might fix it, but I already have the custom map programmed and am hoping it’ll fix itself the more runs I send it on (it gets smarter the more you use it). Something I wish the app would allow is adding other rooms to the current cleaning run without having to send it back to the base first. It’s not really a big deal since it goes back to the charging base by itself, but it feels silly to essentially reset the whole vacuuming run when you only want to add or subtract a room. The locator on the app could be better as well. All it does is tell the robot to play a chime, but I don’t see the point since you can hear where it is from the vacuum sound anyway. I’ve used another AI robot vacuum that actually gives you a live feed of where the robot is in the map of your house. Hopefully Shark aspires to something like this and makes a significant app update, because the hardware is pretty solid and it still does a great job vacuuming the house despite the app issues. Overall, it’s a good robot vacuum that avoids obstacles, vacuums in straight lines, and allows you to be lazy by not having to prepare the house for it. An app update could fix all the issues I have with it, but I’m still pretty happy with it in the meantime. The floor beneath my beds has never been cleaner.

Works great on low pile carpet and bare floors. I do not recommend using where you have high transitions between flooring types (I.e. carpet to hardwood or tile). It tends to “yeet” itself up onto objects instead of noticing their presence, then gets stuck and cannot continue vacuuming unless you physically move it - which completely defeats the purpose of running it at my office at night!

The vacuum stopped working a little less than a week after we bought it. It became a $400 paper weight. It wouldn't power on, wouldn't charge. We returned it to the store. In the short time it was functional, it did a decent job of cleaning the floors ... although be forewarned that this vacuum is very LOUD. Some of the mapping features would be pretty cool if they functioned properly. Our unit would continually get hung up on the same obstacles or spend all kinds of time trying to eat lamp cords, despite placing "no-go zones" in the app. The vacuum also tended to get lost, so when its routine was completed it would spin around in circles in the bedroom until the battery reached 5 percent ... when it would then hide under the bed like a scared puppy. All told, I'm going to chalk up our robot vacuum experience to something that sounds great in theory but didn't really deliver in practice ... at least in the 10-day window before it broke altogether.

I had trouble w/ this vacuum from startup and ran into some more once it started working. The vacuum was easy to assemble and get plugged in. When I first installed the app on my phone I received error messages and the vac wouldn't work or recognize it was there. I tried the 800# provide but the hours were tough to connect and the website help did not do what I needed. After getting a hold of the 800# and was cutoff the vacuum started working. (It may have just needed a full charge but that was not explained in the app or directions) Everything should be run/setup through the app, there are not a lot of options on the vac itself to control. Once up and running the vac needs to map your floor. The vac searches your floor to id the walls and obstacles. It's important to remove items on the floor for this and regular operation. The first map didn't look right so I ran it again (it takes 20-30 minutes to do). Then you can label the room(s) so you can see what it sees. It can go through open doorways and small lips but nothing more than 1/2" high. (Make sure you open all doors and block off steps) The vacuum is VERY LOUD (kind of like a regular vacuum running except this one takes a while so you want to run it when you aren't in the room) I set mine to run midnight after I am in bed. The cleaning is average but it will save you a couple vacuums per week. Here the problem, it got stuck on a pair of flip flops (but didn't blow it out), and it also got stuck on the base of a gaming chair and cut the leather-like fabric w/ the wheels or brush. It says to remove everything from the floor less than 3" high. This is my first robot vac and probably takes getting used to. I would say it's fair-good. Better startup/directions would have saved time. Not sure if these are normal operations for all robot vacs or this is specific to this one.

I received the RV2001 as gift. The unit seems to vacuum good but the mapping app is the poorest I've ever seen. The robot will often get lost and then run out if power trying to get back to home. If it just has to do one room, it seems to find its way back home but if its two on other side of the house, you will have to carry the criter to home base

Cleans well. Has three modes to choose. Eco mode is quiet but not as much suction. I think it’s a great feature we have used a good amount. Goes to its dock and charges. It actually does, unlike two other brands we have tried in our home. Fantastic value for the price.