This robot has everything: near-perfect cleaning capabilities (including floors, walls, and waterline), a powerful battery with six hours of charge under the water, AI-powered debris detection, a solid mobile app. It also has the ability to skim the surface of the pool if you so desire. When finished cleaning, the AquaSense 2 Ultra floats, so collecting it is just a matter of grabbing it from the comfort of the deck. After a quick cleanup, just drop the robot on the included charging stand to juice it back up, no cables required.

What’s not to like? Only two things, really. Monstrous cleaning ability requires a monstrous chassis, and to say the 29-pound Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra is unwieldy would be an understatement. Hauling this robot out of the water can be a chore, so work on your forearm curls if you plan to purchase one.

There’s also the matter of price point: At nearly $3,000 it’s pretty much the most expensive battery-powered pool robot on the market, though plenty of competitors are at least in the ballpark. If your budget’s tighter, you can get most of the same coverage (sans surface skimming) from Beatbot’s Sora 70, which sells for just $1,199.

Best Battery Life

The traditional way to use a pool robot is to keep it dry-docked and charging, then drop it into the pool only when you need it. Fish it out at the end of the run, clean the filter basket, and repeat.

An alternative may appeal to lazier pool owners: Drop the robot in the pool and leave it there for a week or two, let it run on a repeating schedule, then clean it out only when the battery is dead.

The trick with this strategy is that few pool robots have a battery that’s big enough to allow for more than one or two thorough cleanings. But with its new M1-100, iGarden drops a massive 12500 mAh battery into its sleek pool bot, allowing up to 10 hours of run time in floor-only operation. (It can also do wall climbing and waterline cleaning, of course, but that will eat up more of the juice.)