Shark AI Ultra Robot Vacuum with XL Self-Emptying Base – Smart, Powerful, Hands-Free Cleaning
- 🌀 Incredible Suction: Advanced suction technology removes dirt, dust, and debris from all floor types, ensuring deep and effective cleaning across your home.
- 🧹 Matrix Clean Navigation: Uses precision grid cleaning with multiple passes for comprehensive, edge-to-edge cleaning. No spot is left untouched.
- 🗑️ 60-Day XL Self-Empty Base: The bagless base holds up to 60 days of dirt and debris, eliminating the need for frequent emptying or costly replacement bags.
- 🐾 Self-Cleaning Brushroll: Engineered to remove hair and debris without tangling. Perfect for homes with pets, as it captures hair with ease.
- 📍 Precision Home Mapping: 360° LiDAR sensors quickly map your home and adapt to changes, ensuring precise navigation and effective object avoidance—even in the dark.
- 🐶 Ideal for Pet Owners: Captures pet hair, dirt, and allergens efficiently with strong suction and anti-hair wrap technology, making it ideal for multi-pet households.
- 🗣️ Smart Voice & App Control: Works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Use voice commands or the SharkClean app to schedule, start, or stop cleanings with ease.
- 🔋 Recharge & Resume: Automatically returns to the dock when battery is low, recharges, and resumes cleaning right where it left off.
- 📦 What’s in the Box: Shark AI Robot Vacuum, XL Self-Empty Base, 2 Side Brushes, and 1 Filter.
Brand: Shark
Model: AI Ultra
Color: Cool Grey
Special Features: Smart Mapping, Bagless, Self-Emptying, LiDAR Navigation, Obstacle Avoidance, Pet Hair Pick-Up
Dimensions: 8.43″L x 13.08″W x 13.9″H
Pros: so easy to set up, it did take two tries to “map” the house. Make sure doors are open and take items off the floor (dog toys, kid toys, shoes, etc). Super easy though. Love that you can set a schedule and/or just open the app and tell it to clean. You can even choose a specific room instead of the whole house. Cleans the tile wonderfully, no more dog hair tumble weeds!
Cons: not great on high pile carpet. I ran my Dyson over the carpet, just in the main traffic areas and I filled the canister five times. This was right after the shark had vacuumed. Dog hair tends to get stuck in the side of the brush causing it to stop and need to be cleaned frequently. However, once I just used it for the tile only this happened less frequently.
Overall, it saves tons of time cause I was staining the tile every other day. Not enough suction for my carpets, but still worth it in my opinion.
The build quality isn’t amazing. It’s fine, if somewhat flimsy feeling. It’ll probably last a few years but I wouldn’t expect it to withstand much abuse.
It sometimes makes a wad out of some dog fur (two heavy shedders with medium length, fine fur) and gets it jammed in the beater brush. This stops the machine until a human clears the jam and is frustrating.
The app. It’s hot garbage. Slow, clunky user interface. It takes 10-15 seconds to refresh to display current status and battery level. I use it only to schedule cleaning and otherwise leave it alone.
Vacuum power. It’s good enough to pick up aforementioned dog fur. There’s not much else to pick up, so this is good enough. Battery lasts about 90 minutes for me, which is enough to clean the area I want (~750 square ft). Charging takes forever, though (2-3 hours).
The dust collection base seems to work well but has several filters that are pretty small and collect very fine dust quickly. If they get clogged the machine won’t run until it’s all cleared out.
Navigation. It makes nice straight patterns on the carpet. It will cleanse one room at a time before moving to the next (if you let it map the house out via the app and then assign rooms to each area at least). It can be sent to a specific room or rooms via the app. The “matrix” clean / multi-pass clean only is available one room at a time though.
Would I buy another one? Maybe. If it ends up buying durable, then probably. If the app gets faster and more useful, that would be good, too.
Pros
1. sweeps the house with little to no oversight.
2. Very quiet. Even when you are in the same room you can still easily have a conversation. I wouldn't run it when I was trying to sleep, but much quieter than our manual vacuum.
3. Setup was easy. Found the wifie with no problems
4. No connectivity issues. This is great and a pleasant surprise based on other wifi appliances we have owned.
5. Mapping was adequate, if a little awkward. You only have to do it once so I count it a win!
6. Handles the carpets well. No problem getting onto and off of them. It struggles with the ledge into our kitchen which is probably a full inch but it always triumphs! Also no problem with going over electrical cords.
7. Nice low profile so it can get under pretty much all our furniture. This is a big win.
8. Dust bin is quite adequate for our house. Occasionally it will empty in the base in the middle of a clean but it takes right back up. We empty the base after each cleaning
Cons
1. Battery life is adequate but barely. Our upstairs is a little less than 1200 ft and it can do it on one battery charge if nothing goes wrong, but if there is a hickup then you're out of luck.
2. When it encounters an error it cannot restart from the point the error occurred. You have to restart from the beginning.
3. It sees our intake vent for our furnace as a cliff occasionally and will ask for assistance. This is the one error, however, which it recovers from gracefully and continues so it is really just a minor annoyance.
4. It seems to fail more often than I'd like. Either the rollers get clogged, or the dustbin on the unit gets clogged or something. One time it unplugged the base station during cleaning! As noted above if one of these errors occurs you have the fix the problem and start over, it won't take up where it left off.
5. Mapping is awkward. I would like to make our furnace intake vent a no-go zone, but am not ready to try that with the mapping.
It is cool to see it trundling around doing it's job so earnestly. Table legs, kitchen ledges -- it perseveres until it gets the job done!
Let me first preface this by saying I had a huge bias against purchasing a robot vacuum. I honestly thought they were useless, unable to adequately clean the house, and would be built to be more of a remote control car than an actual cleaning device.
Well....Prime Day comes along, and this bad boy is on sale, and I figured I'd take a shot at it. I have a husky, and I spend most of my evenings sweeping the floor - CONSTANTLY. It would get so bad, especially during the summers where I'd just be exhausted from work, gym, and dinner that I would avoid sweeping until the next day or the day after. I eventually transitioned to using my vacuum, which helped a little, but I found myself going through the process of still sweeping, then vacuuming to pick up any missed particles of hair, fuzz, or dust.
So...I bought this guy, and omg it's been a godsend. I run this bad boy every three days, and my house is noticeably cleaner and smells better. I can literally relax and play with my dog while the robot is cruising around the house picking up everything!. I was impressed by the amount it picked up. As a result of the frequency, I find less and less hair/dirt/fuzz on the floor. Don't get me wrong, I still use my broom and hand held vacuum, but that's usually on the weekends when I do a much deeper clean of the home. However, it takes less time because there is so much less mess on the floor. I still speculate that the robot isn't 100%, but I guess neither am I. HAHAHA
Pros:
- Cleans my 900 sqft home in about 40 minutes. Able to pick up dust, fur, dirt, and crumbs from the floor with no issues. (haven't tried larger objects)
- The wheels are like hidden monster truck wheels and are independent of each other so that it can traverse over carpet and other slightly elevated areas.
- The app allows a full map of your house, as well as creating or sectioning off your home so that the if you want to vacuum specific areas (in my case the kitchen and game room where my husky usually sleeps or hangs out) it will clean the area and be done.
- The speed settings are pretty nifty too, and can be adjusted to get a much thorough cleaning.
Cons:
- This could be my fear, but due to the warning about liquids on the floor, I have to do a preclean to make sure there isn't spots of drool from my dog, or areas where I may have dropped water from washing dishes, etc. I also have to ensure that all the wires, and stuff on the floor are put away to make sure the robot doesn't get caught.
- The battery seems a little bit of a drain. One cleaning reduces the battery all the way to 60%, not sure if that's normal, but I figured since it's new, it'll be at maybe 80% or have a power save function.
- The collecting bin should come with some cleaning instruction, I want to make sure this bad boy stays with me for a long while, so I like to learn how to keep the seal that keeps the bin closed tight, remains in tact. It's made of like a soft sponge material, and feel it'll degrade after a few dumps (we'll see).
- After researching a few models, I wish this also had the swiffer pad attachment or something so that it could polish or mop the floor as well. I know it doesn't always pick up the super tiny dust bunnies, but that pad would be amazing
Overall, I give it a solid 90%. I've only had it for a little over a month, and I hope I have many years with this thing. If you haven't given a robot vacuum a try, I'd definitely recommend it....coming from someone that despised them.
So now this thing is working better. You've got to let this thing charge like 100%. Let it map the house. Then it works pretty good. It got stuck a couple times on some obstacles but I'm not going to knock that. Once you vacuum proof AKA childproof your floor. It'll work fine. Every time it's done vacuuming it dumps itself which is The first time I've ever had a dumping vacuum. It is definitely nice not to bend over and pull that dust bin out all the time with dogs. All in all I'm pretty happy with it. I'm knocking off a star because this thing is clunky. Even brand new it sounds like it's breaking. It's got like a grinding crunching noise when the bar spins underneath the machine. You also can't zoom into maps and see little tracks where the unit has run. Other vacuums has little trails on where the unit went. This just tells you it did that room in general. It would be nice to see the exact route this thing took so I can see if I have to put a no-go zone somewhere. Make sure you get it on sale and it's worth the money. End of story unless it breaks and I'll report back.
Update:
Let it charge over 50% before you use it. When I set it up the app kind of let me run it right away and instead of mapping the house it just started cleaning. I put it back on the charger and let it go to 100%. It seems to charge very very slow compared to my last one.
Once it was 100% charged it did map the house in about 15 mins and then it dumped itself and I set it off to clean. Seems to work pretty good over all. Lots of dog hair and dirt in the hopper. I will report back after a few weeks. So far I am happier than I was when I first got it so we will see.
I think it's important to log your first impression so here we go. It was well packaged I was pleased to see that. It takes up a good bit of space in your house so find a nice piece of wall. It had 30% charge when I set it up and for some reason it wanted to get started mapping my house so I let it. I'm coming off of a wyze vacuum cleaner. I had bought it twice from Amazon and I like it but some reason after a year the suction just seems to die down and no matter how much air I blow through it it doesn't seem to clean it out. Thus this replacement. My first thoughts is it's like watching Grandpa walk around when he's lost at home. The thing bumps into everything with no hope of actually having a plan. It still mapping my house so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt. Right now I'm not so impressed with the suction. I don't know if it slow suction down while it maps the house or what. It might be a little early to leave a review but I think it's important again to explain this in detail. Right now I've got a lot of doubt but will give it a couple days and I'll report back. One thing I really don't like is right now when I press dock it went the complete wrong way and decided to not dock. I liked the Waze vacuum cleaner because it went right to its home and knew everything was. I hope this works out better than my first impression.
The first thing you do is plug it in to finish charging up the battery. I didn't use it until the next day. In the meantime, download the app and connect the vacuum to the internet. This was the most difficult part for me. It kept saying to reboot the modem, reboot the vacuum, reboot... But after several times, it finally did connect to the wifi, so be patient. The app itself is user friendly. I played around with it just to figure it all out. (And you get to name your vacuum as this point.) The next day, I let Jaws map the house. He was fun to watch as he went from room to room, turning, stopping and going, spinning and looking around. After he finished mapping, he went back to the dock. This is when you label the rooms and make no-go zones in the app. Just a tip about no-go zones. Pinch the map to make the area larger so you can clearly see exactly where you want to put the no-go zone--otherwise it's too small to see where you want it. Once you are satisfied with that, you can send him out to clean a single room, multiple rooms or the entire house. And you can choose the power level of cleaning. In settings, there are a few other choices like do not disturb, recharge and resume, evacuate and resume, etc. I sent Jaws out to clean a room at a time just so I could see where he went, what he cleaned and if he missed any areas. When that was all done, I realized that I had to remap the house again. This is a minor flaw with the app. You have to map the entire house and can't map one room at a time. There were some areas that he missed but I think it was more my fault than his. In the app, trying to distinguish exactly where one room ends and another begins is not exact. Instead of labeling every single room, for instance, I made my master bedroom with adjoining bathroom and adjoining walk-in closet as one huge room. I did that also for the guest bedroom--the hallway and guest bathroom and the guest bedroom were mapped as one room. You will know what I mean once you are actually in the app and mapping and labeling your rooms. But if you want to, you can label every single room, large or small, especially if you think any of those rooms need a touch up more than others. By the way, after cleaning three fairly large rooms, the battery only went down to about 70%. The vacuum picks up surface dirt: crumbs, dust bunnies, cat fur and litter, etc., and some deep stuff. I still own a regular vacuum for very deep cleaning but now use it less often. Otherwise, I use Jaws every day. I am a senior citizen and don't want to spend my retirement thinking about dragging out the big vacuum. I love it. You learn after a few runs what you need to pick up or move out of the way beforehand. I found that out after Jaws went into the kitchen for the first time and attacked the cat food and water bowls. But you learn all this as you go along. I ended up making about five maps all together before I was totally satisfied knowing that most, if not all, of the rooms were getting cleaned. For some reason, it misses a very small 2'x2' corner in my bedroom. Doesn't want to go over there. It might have something to do with a no-go zone close by. Rather than make another map of the ENTIRE house, I am ok with the map that I ended up with. Other than that small area, he cleans the rest of the house to my satisfaction. Jaws spoke to me today and said to clean the filter. There was a clump of dust bunnies and cat fur blocking the poop door. Smart fellow. Almost forgot: I attempted to set it up with Alexa to use verbal commands but for some reason, it wouldn't work for me. I could have spent more time trying to figure it out but it's just as easy for me to use the app. Money well spent. I also purchased a two-year warranty so I'll end up with three years of protection. And I bought a kit of replacement parts, filters, etc. No regrets. Jaws and I have become good friends even if he wants to eat the cat food.
First, there are few directions within the app. Thus I had to search through the various menus and randomly press buttons in an effort to find something. Then on several occasions I found the item I wanted to find wouldn't show up at all until the robot completed it's first full cleaning. It's a learning curve I know, but they could have helped a lot more than they did.
Then after the robot completed the first cleaning, magically, a map of the house appeared and once I got the image turned rightside up, it was simple to name the rooms. But herein lies a small issue. The app provides a list of room labels to choose from, but there appears to be no provision for customizing names. Hence, my wife's sewing room became the "Playroom."
I knew there was a place to set the robot's suction power (Eco, Normal, Max) and after 20 minutes of re-searching, I found it. However the setting appears to apply to all the rooms to be cleaned. This is fine if you have all carpet or all smooth surfaces. Most of our floors are smooth but the master bedroom is a rather deep pile carpet.
The app allows you to name each room and send the robot off to clean all, several, or just one. This is nice. But having that capability without the ability to set the suction level for each room separately seems rather brain-dead!
That's my compaints so far. Lets move on to the more positive aspects of the robot.
I mentioned, the fairly deep pile carpet in the bedroom. The robot handled it with aplomb. There was a noticeable change in speed and ease of operation but it pushed through without a whimper. I had it on normal power and would prefer "Max," but will try that later.
The map it produced was remarkably good for a single cleaning run and I could easily determine which room was which, once I got it rightside up.
" a single cleaning run" could be misleading. Two full charges were needed to complete the cleaning. The app does provide a decent report of the robots activity. It started cleaning at 9:56 am, then briefly docked 30 min. later (orientation ??) and resumed cleaning after emptying its dust bin. The battery ran low (about 30%) after 83 minutes of cleaning time. 3 hr. and 15 min. were required for the battery to recharge. It then cleaned (with an intermediate docking) for nearly 2 hours where it died in our bathroom with 5% charge showing in the app. We carried it back to the docking station where it exhausted the debris and began recharging. 6.5 hours were required from staart to finish. This isn't good, or bad, It;s just information for you.
The app says 2276 sq ft were cleaned. This is about twice too much. About 1350 sq ft (gross outside dimensions) were available, but that includes closets, furniture, bathtubs, etc that block the robot. I did notice that it systematically recleaned numerous areas on the second charge, So I don't think their numbers are wrong, just duplicated.
Its ability to navigate appears to be excellent. It does travel in long, precisely straight lines when it can. Though it seems to turn around at about 20 ', regardless. When it approaches a wall or furniture, it will slow and gently tap the barrier, or turn just before reaching the item. It typically turns corners around furniture efficiently, though there is sometimes a bit of wasted spinning around.
Except for the time where it ran out of juice, it effortlessly relocated the dock to recharge and empty the onboard dust bin.
We have a pet cat with 2" fur, very fine fur, that sheds constantly. There is no reason that cat isn't totally bald! The roller brush and side brushes seemed to handle it well. Both were relatively free of her fur. I know I will have to clean the axels and the roller every few weeks but it should be tolerable.
If I think of it, I'll add to this review at a later date.
So here is an update. It's now April 21, 2023 and I'm still very pleased with the machine. It seems to do a good job on our hard surfaced floors as it seldom misses visible debris. The degree of cleaning on our carpets is harder to know, but the dust bin always contains an abundance of cat hair. Speaking of cat hair, the roller NEVER clogs with cat hair. However, the axles on the roller do collect hair. I have to clean them every 2-3 weeks as the machine stops and says "my roller is clogged." That said, the roller axles are very easy to clean. No tools are needed since the roller cover just snaps in and out and the roller then lifts out nicely exposing the axles and housings. Though a small pick is needed to clean one end of the axle.
The shark never gets caught in a corner or tight spot when there is a path out. Our Neato used to get caught frequently for no good reason. The shark has gotten caught a few times on cords, shoe laces etc, and twice has run up on the track of our patio door and gotten stuck but it is vastly better at returning to the base station than our Neato.
I have the "Extended Clean" option turned on which tells the Shark to continue cleaning until it needs charging. Lately it has run out of power a few times and had to be manually returned to the base station . I will try it with extended clean "Off." This may cause it to take longer to clean the house but may increase reliability.
The attached photo illustrates the depth of pile in our carpet as well as the manner in which it cleans. The shark is quite systematic when cleaning but it does sometimes cover some areas twice.
We have some open grates on our floor and the Shark traverses them without issue. The Neato would stop on them and discontinue cleaning so we had to use the magnetic strips (supplied) to avoid this issue. The shark recognizes the magnetic strips, but they aren't needed for the grates.
I empty the dust bin on the base station probably once every 3 weeks which works fine. That's all for now.
Here's another update,. It is now January 10, 2024 and the Shark has 11 months under it's belt. It started doing weird things/errors after about 6 months so I replaced the battery which was needed with our Neato and it took care of our problem. It continues to perform well until it picks up a small rock or pea sized chunk of dog food, which happens frequently now that we were forced to change our little dog's food for medical reasons. The shark does pick up these items but they fail to exhaust into the dustbin and lodge either in the throat of the dustbin or get stuck in the spring loaded door on the Shark. When that happens an error occurs and the shark ceases operation. This issue is simple to fix. However the most annoying thing is after clearing the blockage, the Shark doesn't pickup where it left off. I have to select the rooms that were missed (very nice capability by the way) and tell it to start cleaning again.
May 14, 2024
The shark, as near as I can tell continues to function normally. However, the dustbin's failure to empty and subsequent error messages that prevent the unit from continuing to clean has finally pushed me over the edge. It is rare that the entire set of rooms get vacuumed. Most days I have to restart the machine at least once during the cleaning cycle and then it "forgets" where to restart. The bottom line is it's too frustrating to use now and it's going in the trash.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: This is my first robot vacuum so I can’t really compare it against other models. We have had it for a few weeks now so I feel like I can give a proper review. I will update if my feelings change. We had been skeptical of robot vacuums for years but I wish we didn’t wait so long. This has been a game changer! Our house has multiple pets (dogs, cat, cockatiels) and we live in the country. To keep the floor clean, I needed to sweep at least once a day if not more. I also have a lot of furniture (obstacles) in relatively small rooms so I was concerned a robot vacuum would get lost, confused, or just not do a very good job. So far, this vacuum has gone above and beyond my expectations.
Let’s start with the cleaning power. We have low carpets, laminate flooring, and stone tile. The robot does a great job cleaning all floor types. We had an Oreck vacuum for the carpet and I think the shark does a better job picking up the pet hair and dust. There is also some minor elevation changes throughout the house (0.5-1 inch high in some entryways) and the robot actually climbs over these areas really well.
The app and the map: The app is relatively easy to use but I wish it would show you where the robot had actually been while cleaning on the map. The mapping is pretty accurate but I didn’t get it right until the second try. For our first mapping run, I thought it would be best to keep all things on the floor that would normally be there so the robot would be better at negotiating around things. This made a very confusing map and the robot had a hard time properly identifying rooms. You can name rooms during map editing but it is easier to do that if the borders actually make sense. Second round, I took all small/medium things (pet bowls, trash cans, etc) off the floor. Only furniture and large appliances were left on the floor. This was a much better map and even though there are usually these smaller things on the floor, the robot does a really good job tightly negotiating obstacles. Having said that, make sure you place the base in an open area because if anything gets in its way directly around the base, it will get confused and start circling things like table legs or get stuck in a loop somewhere near the base but never make it to the base. It tells you exactly how much open space around the base you need so take that seriously.
The self emptying base is awesome. In the first few runs, we had to rescue the robot from cords and larger things like marbles and legos that sometimes got stuck but now that it is on a daily schedule and we moved all cords, there haven’t been any issues. Maintenance is really easy and intuitive on this machine. I just wish it could suck up larger things like legos and coins.
Overall, I definitely think it was worth what we paid. My only complaints are that I wish the app showed the path of the robot on the map and that it could pick up larger things without those things getting stuck. Other than that, we are all very happy with it.