The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is the closest thing we have tested to a robot vacuum you genuinely never have to touch. It empties its own bin, refills its own water, and washes and hot-dries its own mop pads — and then cleans the floors properly between all of that. It is also very expensive. Here is exactly what that money buys, and where the limits are.
Most robot vacuums ask you to do a little maintenance: empty the bin, rinse a mop pad, top up a tank. The S8 Pro Ultra exists to remove all of that. Its docking station is a small appliance in its own right, and the robot itself sits at the top of Roborock's range for suction, navigation and mopping. The result is the most hands-off cleaning we have measured — which is why it is our premium pick rather than our best overall. It costs as much as a decent washing machine, and you have to decide whether the convenience is worth that. For most readers it will not be, and that is a perfectly sensible conclusion. For a busy household with mostly hard floors, it can be transformative.
| Model | Price | Suction | Mopping | Navigation | Rating | Link | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ★ Top pick Roborock S8 Pro Ultra | £1,159.90 | ~6,000 Pa | Yes (dual spinning, auto-lift) | LiDAR + structured-light obstacle avoidance | ★ 4.5 | View → |
£1,159.90 £1,399.99
~6,000 Pa · Yes (dual spinning, auto-lift) · LiDAR + structured-light obstacle avoidance
The verdict from Raj Patel, home appliance tester
The premium pick — the closest thing to a hands-off cleaner. The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is the unit to buy if you want to genuinely set and forget for weeks: the docking station empties the dustbin, refills the water tank, then washes and hot-dries the mop pads so they never go mouldy. The dual spinning mops are the only ones here that scrub rather than wipe, and the pads lift on carpet to keep rugs dry. It costs as much as a decent washing machine and the dock is bulky, but for a busy home with hard floors, nothing else cleans this thoroughly with this little effort.
After it docks you hear the station quietly cleaning itself; come back days later and there is simply nothing to do.
The S8 Pro Ultra is the right machine if you want to set the floors to clean themselves and then forget about them for weeks at a time — and you have the budget to pay for that privilege. It suits a home with a lot of hard flooring (tile, laminate, engineered wood, vinyl) where the mopping does real work, plus a mix of rugs and low-pile carpet that the auto-lifting pads can clear without soaking. It is ideal for people who are time-poor rather than money-poor: parents, full-time workers, anyone who would rather pay once and stop thinking about floor care.
It is not the sensible choice if your home is mostly thick carpet, where the mopping is largely wasted and a vacuum-first robot makes more sense, or if you simply want clean floors at a fair price. In those cases you are paying hundreds of pounds for dock features you will not use. If that sounds like you, the Roborock Q5 Pro delivers the same brand's excellent mapping and strong suction for a fraction of the cost, and the Shark Matrix Plus is built specifically for carpeted British homes. The S8 Pro Ultra is a luxury, and an honest review should say so plainly.
The dock is the whole point of this machine, so it deserves the most scrutiny. When the robot returns, the station does four jobs without any input from you. It empties the dustbin into a sealed bag inside the dock, so the small onboard bin never overflows. It refills the robot's clean-water tank from a reservoir in the base, so the mop always has fresh water to work with. It washes the mop pads, scrubbing them against the dock's tray to clear the grime they have picked up. And — the detail that matters most — it hot-dries the pads with warm air so they do not sit damp and turn musty between cleans.
That last step is the difference between a mopping robot you tolerate and one you actually keep using. Anyone who has owned a cheaper mop robot knows the smell of a pad left wet in a tray; the hot-dry step removes that problem entirely. In practice it means you can ignore the whole system for a couple of weeks: the only recurring task is refilling the clean-water reservoir and tipping out the dirty-water tank, which on a normal home is roughly a once-a-week job rather than a daily one. The dust bag inside the dock holds several weeks of debris before it needs changing. It is, genuinely, the least maintenance we have asked of any robot in this group.
Most robot mops drag a flat damp cloth across the floor. That picks up loose dust but does little against a dried-on splash or a sticky patch in the kitchen. The S8 Pro Ultra uses two spinning pads that rotate against the floor under downward pressure, so they scrub rather than wipe. On hard floors this is the best mopping in this comparison by a clear margin — it lifts the kind of marks a single drag pad simply smears around. For a kitchen or a tiled hallway that takes daily traffic, it is the closest a robot gets to a quick hand-mop.
The other clever part is that the pads lift when the robot detects carpet, so it does not drive a wet cloth across your rugs. That sounds obvious but plenty of mop robots get it wrong, leaving damp tracks across carpet. Here the lift is generous enough to clear low and medium pile cleanly. The honest caveat is that no robot mop, this one included, replaces a deep mop of a very dirty floor — it is a maintenance tool that keeps a clean floor clean, not a rescue tool for a neglected one. Used that way, it earns its keep.
The S8 Pro Ultra navigates with a spinning LiDAR turret on top, which maps the room with a laser and lets it clean in tidy, methodical lines rather than bumping about at random. Mapping is fast and accurate, multi-floor maps are supported, and the Roborock app — one of the best in the category — lets you send the robot to a single room, set no-go zones, and schedule cleans down to the room and the day. If you have used a random-pattern budget bot, the difference in coverage and control is night and day.
For spotting clutter on the floor it adds structured-light obstacle avoidance, projecting a pattern to judge the shape and distance of objects in its path. In testing it handled cables, socks and the odd shoe well, weaving around most of them rather than dragging them along. It is very good — though we would still give the edge in raw obstacle dodging, and especially in avoiding pet mess, to the camera-based system on the iRobot Roomba Combo j7+, which remains the one we trust most around a dog or cat. If avoiding accidents is your single biggest worry, read our robot vacuum for pet hair guide before you commit.
There are two real drawbacks and neither is a flaw in how the machine cleans. The first is the price. At around four figures, the S8 Pro Ultra costs as much as a quality washing machine, and that is a lot to spend on floor cleaning when a £270 Roborock will vacuum nearly as well. You are paying almost entirely for the self-cleaning dock — the convenience, not the cleaning. If that convenience is worth it to you, it is worth it; if you hesitate at the number, that hesitation is the correct instinct, and you should look down the range.
The second is the dock's footprint. To hold a dust bag, two water tanks and a mop-washing tray, the station is tall and wide, and it needs a clear stretch of skirting board with a power socket nearby and room for the robot to dock cleanly. In a small flat that real estate is not always easy to find. Plan where it will live before you buy, because a cramped dock position undermines the whole hands-off promise. If you want the same self-cleaning trick in a slightly more affordable, still-sizeable package, the Dreame L10s Ultra is the obvious alternative to weigh up.
Almost everything. When the robot returns, the all-in-one station empties the dustbin into a sealed bag, refills the robot's clean-water tank, and then washes the mop pads and hot-air dries them so they do not turn mouldy between cleans. It is the most genuinely hands-off setup here — you mostly just top up water and detergent every week or two.
On everyday cleaning, for many homes, yes. Its dual spinning pads press down and rotate, so they scrub light dried marks rather than just wiping — a clear step above the drag pads on cheaper robots. It will not match a hands-and-knees deep scrub of a heavily soiled floor, but for keeping hard floors genuinely clean day to day it is excellent.
If you have a lot of hard flooring and value your time, it makes a strong case. You are paying for the most automated cleaning available — vacuum, scrub-mop, self-empty and self-wash — so that you can ignore the machine for weeks. If your home is mainly carpet, or you are happy emptying a bin yourself, a Roborock Q5 Pro or Dreame L10s Ultra delivers most of the benefit for far less.
The S8 Pro Ultra is our premium pick because nothing else here cleans this thoroughly with this little effort. The dock that empties, refills, washes and hot-dries removes essentially every routine chore, the dual spinning mops are the best on test for hard floors, and the LiDAR navigation and app are excellent. The only honest reservations are the price — it costs as much as a washing machine — and the bulky dock that needs proper floor space. If those do not put you off, it is the most complete robot in this comparison. If they do, you lose very little real-world cleaning by stepping down to the Dreame L10s Ultra for its self-cleaning dock at a lower price, or the Roborock Q5 Pro if you would rather pay far less for a vacuum-first robot. Either way, start with our buying guide and our take on whether you need a self-emptying dock before you spend this kind of money, and see how we reach these calls on our how we test page.