Sharks latest robot vacuum hunts stains with UV light

The Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal is SharkNinja’s latest robot vacuum and mop. A flagship model with a multifunctional dock that empties the dustbin and refills and washes its mop, the Reveal’s signature feature is a UV light designed to “find” stains on your floors. It costs $1,299.99 and is available now.

Combined with an RGB camera to detect visible messes and obstacles, the UV light lets the vacuum spot stains that aren’t visible under normal lighting, such as pet urine. When it encounters dirt, visible or not, the robot uses onboard AI to identify and decide how to clean it.

Its cleaning tools include a vacuum with a single roller brush and a wide, flat mop pad that can vibrate to scrub floors. The robot can check that the mess has been removed before moving on or return after the main clean to tackle it again.

I’ve been testing the PowerDetect UV Reveal for a few days, and this feature has been impressive. When the robot gets to a mess — be it Cheerios, ketchup, strawberry jam, or invisible “pet urine” (I went with lemonade) — it stops, examines it, and then methodically cleans it. It’s been successful with everything I’ve thrown at it so far.

While the UV light puts on quite a show, you really only need it for invisible stains. As most of the grime on the floor is easy for the camera to spot, I can’t see the light being useful on a daily basis. But it’s what the robot does when it identifies a mess that impressed me.

Rather than just cleaning your floors as most robot vacs already do, the Reveal actively targets messes by adapting its route and methods to clean them. While many high-end robots can detect dirty areas and repeatedly clean them, the Reveal’s approach is more targeted.

This isn’t the first robot with AI-powered stain-spotting skills. Samsung’s Bespoke Jet Bot Combo uses AI to detect stains, and the Dreame X60 has a camera and a “proactive light” to see stains and adapt its cleaning.

However, the closest competition may be Dyson’s newest robot vacuum, the Spot+Scrub Ai. It uses a camera and a green laser to highlight dirt and can “identify, react, check, and clean,” according to Dyson. The Spot is not available in the US yet, so I’ve not tested it. I saw a demo last year.

The PowerDetect UV Reveal is an upgrade to Shark’s PowerDetect Never Touch and more recent ThermaCharge robot vacuum and mop. The biggest changes are the stain detection system and the mop’s scrubbing motion. The multifunction charging base and robot itself have also been subtly redesigned and look more refined.

The Reveal uses a flat mopping pad that automatically detaches and reattaches depending on whether it’s mopping a floor or vacuuming a room with carpet. The pad extends out a few millimeters on either side to clean along the edges. Overall, the mopping is similar to the VibraRise feature of Roborock vacuums, which is one of my favorite mopping systems.

In my testing of robot vacuum mops, I’ve found flat vibrating mop pads to be good for hardwood floors, where the roller mops and spinning mop pads that are now popular among robot vac manufacturers are more effective for tiled or more variegated surfaces — where you need to get into cracks and crevices. One big advantage of flat mop pads is that they’re less bulky and less prone to tangling.

As with all Shark robot vacuums, the Reveal’s self-empty dock doesn’t use bags; instead it uses a washable bin that you just empty into the trash. It comes with a deodorizer canister to help with any smells. Another upgrade with the Reveal is that the dock washes the mop with 185-degree Fahrenheit hot water and dries it with 175-degree hot air to help with sanitation.

The Reveal has Shark’s NeverStuck feature, which lifts up the robot’s body to get over obstacles like room thresholds and onto high-pile carpets. The robot uses lidar, cameras and other sensors for navigation, which Shark calls NeuroNav AI, and this helps it get out of tricky situations.

It did a good job navigating my living room area and even avoiding getting stuck under a narrow coffee table and on the spindly legs of my lounger, two areas where heavier, less nimble bot vacs often get stuck.

As a vacuum, the Reveal did a well when tackling pet hair, Cheerios, and dry oatmeal messes on hardwood floors, but its rather measly single bristle-and-fabric roller brush wasn’t super effective at getting up hair or oatmeal flakes from my thicker-pile carpet. Shark doesn’t release specs about suction power.

Obstacle detection and avoidance is decent; it avoided thicker cables, socks, and shoes without issue. But it did suck up my wired headphones.

I like how it puts on a little light show to give you a visual indicator of what the robot is doing. Purple shows its detected dirt and will boost suction, blue indicates a stain, and red is an error message. My favorite useless feature, however, is how the robot does a little twerk every time it exits the base; it’s frankly adorable.

An issue with every Shark robot vacuum I’ve tested is how loud and rattly they are. That’s still the case with the Reveal. Even on medium power (there are three suction levels), it’s a noisy beast.

A noteworthy feature, given recent news about the DJI’s Romo robot vacuum’s lax security, is that Shark says the stain-detection feature processes images locally and doesn’t send data to the cloud. The camera isn’t accessible to the user and is used only for cleaning, not as a security camera, which some brands offer.

The SharkClean app is simple and easy to navigate, but fairly basic. Starting a run is straightforward; choose from vacuum or vacuum and mop, and you can select from three suction levels and three water flow levels. You can clean specific rooms and spot-clean, but you can’t customize the cleaning by room. There’s also the option to set schedules.

Mapping was quick and accurate, and it was easy to divide rooms, add no-go zones, and name areas. However, it can only map one floor, meaning if you have multiple floors, you have to move the robot and its dock and remap each time.

The vacuum can also work without the app or a Wi-Fi connection; you can control it using the on-device buttons out of the box. However, you lose features like mapping, scheduling, and other settings.

The Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal is a capable flagship vacuum and mop, and its stain detect feature worked well in my tests. There are fewer bells and whistles than on premium models from Roborock and Dreame, but it also costs a few hundred dollars less, and its app is easier to navigate.

While the Reveal doesn’t excel in every category, and the UV light feels a tad gimmicky at times, the targeted stain cleaning works very well. It’s one of the more genuinely useful new ideas in robot vacuums — helping turn the robot from a passive cleaner into something closer to an active housekeeper.

Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge