DJI Romo review: Stunning design meets seriously smart navigation

DJI is no stranger to venturing into new categories, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised when the Chinese giant announced its Romo robot vacuum in 2025. Even though the UK had to wait until April 2026 to buy the brand’s hottest home gadget, I’ve been testing one since January and, by now, have cleaned over 1100 m2 of my home.

Of course, I don’t live in a mansion, and it took me months of testing to achieve that figure. During this time, I learned the strengths and weaknesses of the DJI Romo. As someone who has also tested many of the brand’s other products, I found it great to play around with DJI's best robot vacuum cleaner, and I felt right at home controlling the Romo and navigating the app.

That said, the Romo isn’t perfect. It’s costly and focuses on navigation rather than on cleaning performance. There are some quirks that make the Romo feel more like a gadget than an actually useful home-cleaning device, even though its suction is class-leading. Not to mention the general security concerns that have come up since its launch, when a guy ‘accidentally’ broke into the system of 7,000 Romos.

Nevertheless, the DJI Romo is a fun product and one that leans into what matters most in 2026: good looks (transparent housing!) and a sense that it’s something every gadget lover should own, no matter the price. Should you buy one? How good is the Romo? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Let’s find out

DJI Romo review

Price and availability

The Romo was announced in October 2025 and is available to buy now in the UK via DJI's online store. It comes in three options. The entry-level DJI ROMO S (Water Tank Version) has an all-white housing, and the robot itself is also white. It sells for £929.

The DJI ROMO A (Water Tank Version) includes a transparent vacuum cleaner and a white base unit for £1,149. Finally, the flagship DJI ROMO P (Water Tank Version) features a transparent base unit and a vacuum for £1,299.

Functionally, all versions are more or less identical, except for the Romo P, which has a floor deodoriser compartment, UV sterilises the dust bag, and offers more advanced self-maintenance features. I tested this version and will therefore refer to the Romo P throughout this review.

Design and build quality

The Romo P is one of those rare robot vacuums that feels designed to be seen rather than hidden away. DJI has leaned heavily into its industrial design roots here, giving both the robot and its base station a fully transparent shell that exposes internal components, wiring and structural elements.

It’s very much on trend these days, with brands such as Nothing pushing the see-through aesthetic with great success. However, under its translucent, plastic skin, the Romo P is built to flagship standards.

The robot vacuum itself measures roughly 35 × 35 × 9.8cm and weighs around 4.3–4.4kg, which puts it on the slightly chunkier side for a premium robovac. The extra height is partly down to its sensor array, though notably the LiDAR is embedded rather than turret-mounted, keeping the overall profile relatively clean.

The Romo P combines dual fisheye vision cameras with wide-angle solid-state LiDAR, creating a multi-sensor fusion system that DJI claims can detect objects as small as 2mm. This setup borrows directly from the company’s drone tech, giving the robot a wide field of view and precise spatial awareness.

From a hardware perspective, the Romo P is a fully fledged hybrid cleaner. It packs a whopping 25,000Pa of suction that you can almost feel from the other side of the room, dual anti-tangle roller brushes, and twin extendable side arms for edge cleaning.

On the mopping side, there’s a 164ml onboard water tank feeding dual spinning mop pads at the rear, with an automatic lift to prevent cross-contamination on carpets.

Internally, the robot carries a relatively small ~0.26L dustbin, designed to be emptied frequently into the dock, where most of the engineering heft sits. It’s a large, almost sculptural unit (around 45 × 44 × 42cm, ~10kg) housing a 2.4L dust bag, 4L clean water tank, and 3.2L dirty water tank

The base station handles everything automatically, including dust extraction, mop washing (with heated water), and drying. On the Romo P specifically, it also adds a few premium touches, including a UV-sterilised dust bag, dedicated floor deodoriser compartment, and sealed cleaning solution cartridges.

Whether the transparent look is futuristic or slightly over-the-top will come down to taste, but from a build and engineering standpoint, it’s hard to argue with the execution. I haven’t seen any fogging despite the extensive mop-drying process, which blows my mind.

Navigation and obstacle avoidance

Navigation is where the Romo P really separates itself from the pack, thanks to the dual fisheye camera plus LiDAR setup. DJI has taken the same principles that underpin its drone systems and applied them to a domestic setting, turning the Romo into something akin to a drone on wheels.

According to the brand, the Romo P continuously analyses the space ahead, identifying and avoiding obstacles before it reaches them. That includes cables, toys and even very small items that many rivals tend to push around. Said obstacles are then marked in the DJI Home app after the cleaning session is complete.

There are multiple navigation modes available, including a standard setting that balances coverage and efficiency, and an obstacle-avoidance priority mode that takes a more cautious approach in cluttered environments. The vacuum also appears to learn from previous runs, refining its path over time and becoming more efficient in familiar spaces.

In practice, the sensing system is far from perfect. I haven’t seen the Romo push anything unnecessarily, like some older robot vacuums, and it almost always seems to know how to get around obstacles. Its movement is also clean and linear, with very little deviation from the optimal path.

That said, my Romo P once ripped up the floor edging and dragged the piece of wood with it for a bit. I was actually away from home (the Romo was scheduled to clean at a specific time), and only realised the damage when I got back in. I imagined the Romo P going bananas on the trim and dragging it around the flat like a dog.

Image 1 of 2

We have an area rug in the living room with tassels around two of its edges (it was purchased well before the Romo arrived for testing). After realising a long row of tassels might be troublesome for the robot vacuum, we tucked them under the rug. However, the Romo liked to tussle with them, anyway, often pulling the same tassels out.

The vacuum also liked to clean close to our feet, which, I appreciate, are moving subjects, so they might not be that easy for the Romo to avoid. Overall, though, I was very happy with the fluidity of its movements and was thoroughly impressed by how little correction the Romo needed when doing its thing.

Cleaning performance

The Romo P delivers strong, consistent cleaning performance, with a clear bias towards hard floors where it feels most at home. Its vacuuming prowess is probably the most impressive. The Romo has 25,000Pa suction, which is impressive for such a compact gadget.

In terms of how effective that suction is, it’s not without flaws. Anything that comes near its suction hole, the Romo will gobble up. However, the two front brushes are way too gentle to funnel all the dirt towards the middle, which sometimes leaves little crumbs behind from the Romo.

Luckily, you can set how finely you want the Romo to vacuum your floors, which can alleviate these issues. The downside is that the finer the vacuum, the longer it takes to complete the task, which, I guess, makes sense. I wish the brushes did a better job in the first place, though.

Speaking of the brushes, they are extendable, and so are the rear mops, allowing the Romo to clean corners more efficiently. Better still, it can lift the mops when it detects carpets, preventing your soft flooring from getting wet. In my experience, the Romo could also efficiently detect the edges of a rug, so when I drew a box over the area I wanted it to vacuum, it focused on the rug rather than the hard floor around it.

Again, this feature isn’t without caveats. Even with extended arms, the corner-cleaning performance could be better. You can set Romo to go under obstacles better and finecomb the floor, but it will not be able to touch bits of the floor around sofe legs, for example, no matter how efficient its vision system might be.

Mopping performance is solid, and, to my delight, the vac isn’t too wasteful with water, either. Based on the wastewater tank, Romo picks up a lot of dust and dirt from the floor (I spare you the sight of it). The floor feels much cleaner since we started using Romo regularly, without putting in little to no effort ourselves, which is exactly what you want from a robovac.

The Romo P has the floor deodorising function, which is unique to the model. Sadly, I couldn’t detect any smells (good or bad), despite sniffing the floor right after it dried, a sight of which at least delighted my wife.

One excellent feature of the DJI Romo is the drying of the mops and, in the case of the Romo P, the UV-sterilisation of the dust bag, enabling the parts to do their thing for longer without replacement.

A slight downside of this is the drying time, which is always around four hours, regardless of how long you mop for. If you send the Romo out to clean a bit of the floor for five minutes, it’ll still take four hours to dry the pads, during which the base station emits low-level white noise.

Speaking of noises, the station blows the Romo’s smaller dust compartment clean just before it sets off, and it’s quite loud. I had it set for regular cleaning, and if you forget when it was scheduled, the loud ‘BOOM’ will remind you when the programme starts.

The DJI Home app

The DJI Home app is the hub you’ll refer to while using your DJI Romo. It’s the same app the company uses for controlling its portable power stations, including the DJI Power 1000 v2 and DJI Power 2000. It’s a clean, well-thought-out app that makes it easy to control and monitor your robovac.

There are a ton of settings which I won’t go through individually because I don’t have three days to write this review. Instead, I’ll highlight some of the more unique features.

One of these is Supply Management, which helps you track the lifecycle of Romo’s components, including the mop pads, side brush, filter and roller brushes. It also links you directly to DJI’s store to purchase replacements.

One of the weirdest features is the ability to drive Romo. This feature clearly comes from the drone business and lets you drive the robovac using the DJI Home app. More interestingly, you can use the onboard microphone and speaker to talk to people even if you aren’t near your home.

Yet more interestingly, there is no option to actually clean the floor when driving Romo, which puzzles me. Instead, you can prank people by moving the unit close to them and start chatting through its speakers.

I guess it’s a different way to call home, and maybe some prefer talking to something tangible to their phone. You can even stick a photo of yourself on the top of the robovac to make the experience more personal.

Of course, you can also access the map of your home via the app and set different cleaning settings for each room. I found the mapping sufficiently accurate. Maybe not as elaborate as some other brands that specialise in robot vacuums, but certainly good enough for day-to-day use.

Battery life and charging

Battery performance is another area where the Romo P feels reassuringly robust, and it’s not hard to see the influence of DJI’s experience with high-efficiency power systems. The robot is equipped with a 5,000mAh battery (72Wh), which translates into strong real-world endurance across a range of cleaning modes.

In its most efficient setting, the Romo P can run for up to three hours on a single charge, covering roughly 170–180 square metres before returning to the dock. That drops depending on how hard you push it: expect closer to two hours for combined vacuuming and mopping, and around 90 minutes at maximum suction.

To conserve battery life, the robovac’s battery is kept at around 80% when in the dock, and mine never went over this. If you have a larger house and scheduled tasks, the base station may charge the unit to full just before it runs out of juice halfway through. Even if it did, Romo automatically returns to the base station before its battery is completely depleted.

Charging itself is relatively quick for a robot vacuum of this size. Thanks to 55W fast charging, the battery can be replenished in about 2.5 hours, keeping downtime between cleans to a minimum. Not sure who would need to clean every three hours, though!

Verdict

The Romo P is one of the most exciting robot vacuums in years, but not necessarily one of the most practical. DJI has brought its navigation expertise into the home with impressive results, wrapping it all in a striking transparent design that feels more like a piece of consumer tech than a household appliance.

However, even though the Romo P is packed with clever ideas and genuinely industry-leading obstacle avoidance, its cleaning performance, while good, doesn’t quite match the best from established vacuum brands such as Roborock or Dreame.

Add in a few quirks, a premium price, and lingering concerns about smart features, and it starts to feel more like a showcase of DJI’s capabilities than the most sensible cleaning solution.

If you love gadgets, design and cutting-edge tech, the Romo P is easy to recommend. If you just want the best robot vacuum to keep your floors spotless with minimal fuss, you’ll likely find better options elsewhere.