Shark AI Self Empty XL Review (AV2501AE)

In this review, we&#;ll take a look at the Shark AI Self-Empty Robot Vacuum (AVAE). It&#;s the first robot vacuum from Shark that employed a top-mounted LiDAR system for its smart navigation. After testing it over a couple of weeks in various ways, we think there&#;s a lot to like with only a few minor issues to nitpick. 

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Shark AI Self Empty XL AVAE

$402.82

We think that the Shark AI Self-Empty XL AVAE is a significant step forward in robot vacuum technology, particularly due to its incorporation of a top-mounted LiDAR system which vastly improves its navigational capabilities. This model stands out with its large, bagless auto-empty dock that simplifies maintenance and enhances convenience. Additionally, its competitive pricing makes it an attractive option for those seeking advanced features without a hefty price tag. However, the app's functionality could be refined, and the robot's tendency to get stuck in tight places suggests room for improvement in its navigation algorithm.

Pros:

• LiDAR-based navigation

• Large auto-empty bin

• Economically priced

• Dual brush design

Cons:

• App could be improved

• Can tend to get stuck

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What we like

LiDAR-based Navigation

Starting off with the pros, let&#;s get right to the big difference here, which is the LiDAR-based navigation. Every other robot vacuum from Shark before this, with the exception of the VacMop Pro AI, used V-SLAM, which means they used a top-mounted camera to navigate around. This was the first Shark robot vacuum to use LiDAR. 

Shark AI Self Empty XL AVAE in our studio before testing. © Vacuum Wars

Both LiDAR navigation and camera-based V-SLAM will map your house and help the robot navigate systematically room by room in more or less straight lines and they&#;re both premium features only found on more expensive robot vacuums.

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Both systems have their pros and cons and are really quite similar, but in this case, we think the more precise laser-based system is a big step up from Shark&#;s previous system in terms of navigation. In our tests, it had nearly 100% coverage of both the small and large rooms. It also did well in the real-world navigation tests of our house, avoiding obstacles better than their previous versions, which we think relied too much on their bump sensors.

NEWER SHARK ALTERNATIVE: See our review of the Shark Matrix robot vacuum. It&#;s newer and also features LiDAR navigation and a self-emptying bin.

Improved No-Go Zones

One of the big advantages of using a LiDAR over the previous Sharks is the much more accurate no-go zones, which are zones that you can draw on the map in the app to keep the robot from going where you don&#;t want it to go. This is a feature we consider very important, and it did really well with this in the tests.

Testing App features. © Vacuum Wars

Auto Empty Bin

Another big pro for the Shark AI is a feature that we&#;re starting to consider a must-have, at least for premium robot vacuums, which is the auto-empty bin. When it finishes its cleaning job, it automatically returns to its bin, where a motor on the base kicks in and it sucks the debris out of the bin and into the base. This auto-empty bin on this model is one of the larger capacity bins offered by Shark. 

Shark says it can hold up to 60 days&#; worth of debris. Being on the larger side isn&#;t the only thing that makes it unique, however; it&#;s also one of only a few bagless auto-empty bins on the market, so there are no bags to buy either.

You just empty the bin directly into the trash. It&#;s also a complete HEPA bin, which is only offered by premium manufacturers. The bin is relatively compact, slimmer and shorter than on the S8 Pro Ultra we recently reviewed.

It&#;s more of a standalone rectangle as opposed to having an overhang that creates a sort of half garage for the robot like found on the Eufy X9 Pro or Q Revo.

When docked the Shark AI AVAE empties its dustbin automatically. © Vacuum Wars

We tested this regularly at our house, and in almost every case, it completely emptied the bin of pet hair from our two cats. Well, that was except for the very first run, where we intentionally left our house unvacuumed for two weeks to see if it could empty all the cat hair that built up in that time. It didn&#;t, but we hadn&#;t seen another robot vacuum pull that off either. We had no trouble with it emptying the bin after that day, though.

Shark auto-empty alternatives

There&#;s more than one well-regarded Shark robot with auto-empty. The Shark AVS AI Ultra (see it on Amazon) is another vacuum-only robot with positive customer reviews as is the vacuum and mop combo Shark AI Ultra 2-in-1 (see it on Amazon).

Also, Shark is one of the only manufacturers to include an app setting where you can tell it to return to the base every 30 minutes if you want to, which you would use if you have multiple large pets that shed a lot. In any case, the bin is one of the best Shark had designed at the time, and it holds up well today.

Measuring suction and airflow. © Vacuum Wars

Power and Performance

Another pro is power. The Shark AI AVAE was above average with airflow, and that power showed up on the deep clean test. In that test, we embed sand into medium pile carpet and weigh the bin before and after a five-minute run. Again, the Shark AI was above average, getting the same score as some much more expensive robot vacuums.

In terms of its main job, which is picking stuff up from the surfaces of carpets and hard floors, it was again above average. We really like Shark&#;s dual brush design, and all of its brushes worked well together on hard floors, where it had a nice clean pickup even on its lower power settings and impressively even with heavy debris like kitty litter. It had no problems with larger debris either on carpets or hard floors, and it also did perfectly with pet hair. Basically, in terms of pickup, it was all good.

Anti-Hair Tangle Technology

Another feature that was new when the AVAE was released was its redesigned main brush. Shark says it is better than their previous anti-hair tangle technology. We did find it to be good but not perfect. You will still need to regularly keep it clean, in our opinion, if you have longer hair.

Inspecting the brushroll for hair tangles. © Vacuum Wars

Price

The biggest pro for the Shark AI Robot Vacuum, though, is the price. Shark seems to be engineering robot vacuums that are good enough at incredibly low prices. They&#;re usually not the best robots in every respect, but Shark robot vacuums have consistently been the best in terms of bang for the buck, in our opinion. The same is true here, and since the model has been out for a while now, you catch it on sale often.

Related: Shopping for a robot that empties its own bin? Check out our Ecovacs T10 Omni Review. It&#;s on the premium end of the spectrum, but its features might win you over!

AI and Obstacle Avoidance

Before we get to the negative stuff, we did want to make one quick note on the Shark&#;s use of AI in the robot&#;s name. As far as we can tell, this is more or less marketing speak. It&#;s not AI in the sense that it has machine learning based obstacle avoidance, which can be found in some high-end robot vacuums. It won&#;t, for example, avoid obstacles that are too low for its LiDAR or too light for its bump sensors to detect.

Shark AI Self Empty XL during carpet deep clean testing. © Vacuum Wars

The Shark AI does avoid obstacles of a certain height and without using its bump sensor, but it does so with a combination of its top-mounted laser and front-mounted infrared sensors, which is common to most laser and LiDAR-based robot vacuums. Regardless, if you&#;re looking for true obstacle avoidance, do be aware that this model does not have it.

What could be improved

App Issues

One of the main negative things we felt about this robot was the app. It&#;s not the worst app in the world, but it&#;s far from the best either. It&#;s kind of buggy; we often had to restart it to get it to do something or another we wanted. It doesn&#;t have real-time monitoring of the robot on the map, which is a minor thing but a feature that is noticeably absent.

It also took two runs to map our house, which is not all that uncommon and something which we attributed to the app. Some of these things may have been addressed with software updates (we reviewed it when it was first released). And, while we did have some challenges, the app did include all the premium app features you would want. And, those features do work well &#; things like on-demand cleaning to target specific rooms and advanced scheduling options.

Are you interested in learning more about Animatronic Shark? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!

Algorithm and Battery Life

Another thing is its algorithm. It&#;s just a little too persistent when it gets into a tight spot, meaning that if there&#;s a place for it to get stuck, it&#;s probably going to find it. So, you really need to make use of those no-go zones and put small barriers around problem areas in the app in order to make sure it has a nice clean run every time.

Be sure to set up No-Go Zones so the AVAE doesn&#;t get stuck. © Vacuum Wars

Also, the battery life, which Shark says can get 80 minutes on low power, is below average. It&#;s not that big of a deal, as it has the ability to recharge and resume cleaning exactly where it left off. That works for most houses, but if you have a larger floor plan, you&#;ll probably find that it will take two runs to complete one job, depending on the power setting you&#;re using.

Final Takeaways

Our takeaways are that the AVAE&#;s navigation is a major improvement for Shark robot vacuums, making them more valuable overall. Of course, subsequent Shark models have embraced LiDAR-based navigation, but this is the Shark robot vacuum that brought LiDAR into the picture.

Everything else on this model is what you need to get the most out of a robot vacuum. It cleans both hard floors and carpets really well. When you combine all the navigation and scheduling features with its high-quality auto-empty bin, you have an incredibly good value robot vacuum, which is hard to beat.

Shark AVAE Specs

Vacuum typeRobot vacuumMotor wattage650Self-emptyingYesObstacle avoidanceNoAlexa CompatibleYesGoogle Assistant CompatibleYesMax battery run time80 minSelf-empty base capacity60 DaysRobot Length x Width13.7 in x 13.7 inRobot Height4.1 in.ColorBlackSpecifications from the Shark website.

This editorial originally ran in June for the film&#;s 40th anniversary.

It&#;s no secret that one of Jaws&#; greatest strengths is that we don&#;t get a good look at the antagonistic shark until the third act. You know the story. The thing kept malfunctioning and forced Steven Spielberg to find creative ways to represent the monstrous fish (affectionately dubbed &#;Bruce&#; by the cast and crew in honor of Spielberg&#;s lawyer) without actually showing it: the ominous theme music, lots of POV shots, yellow floatation barrels, the wreckage of a collapsed dock. It was accidentally Hitchcockian, a word that now seems more associated with Spielberg than Hitchcock himself.

But let&#;s be honest: After the big reveal, we actually do see the leviathan quite a bit and from many different angles. There are the frequent head shots whenever Bruce pops his snout out of the water, the actual shark footage to depict the beast underwater, and the grand finale where the shark breaches itself onto the stern of the Orca. Granted, this all occurs in the last third of the movie, but Jaws, Hitchcockian as it is, ends up delivering a whole lotta shark by the time Chief Brody and Matt Hooper paddle back to the safety of the beach. With the film turning 45 this Saturday, we think it&#;s the perfect time to give Bruce&#;s physical appearance the spotlight it deserves.

&#;Quint&#;s Revenge&#; by Paul Jackson

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First off, the mechanical shark doesn&#;t look real. At all. That&#;s not a knock against Art Director Joe Alves, whose animatronics were revolutionary back in and still hold up in their own special way. It&#;s just that when stacked up against an actual great white shark, Bruce is slower, fatter, clunkier, and, if we&#;re being fair to shark conservation, meaner. While there&#;s the obvious difference in size &#; most great whites don&#;t measure up to the 25-foot length of the one in the film &#; the most prominent inaccuracy resides in, ironically enough, the jaws.

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The jaws of a real great white shark aren&#;t attached to the rest of its head. Instead, they&#;re an entirely separate muscle that makes for a weaker bite than most people believe. To give you some perspective, the significantly smaller bull shark has the strongest bite force of any shark, and the saltwater crocodile has the strongest bite of any animal in the world &#; more than six times that of a great white.

But the detachable jaws also give the shark more range of power when hunting. If a great white wants to gauge the appeal of its prey, it can give a soft(ish) test bite. If the animal is tasty, it goes in for the stronger &#;kill&#; bite. Many shark attack victims survive because they&#;ve been grazed by a test bite, which prompted the shark to swim away in search of something more blubbery, like a seal.

Since a great white&#;s jaws almost act like their own organism, a specimen looks much different when it&#;s attacking something. The flesh around its mouth rolls back, exposing the massive jaw muscle and giving it a far more horrific appearance than its usual sly smile.

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In Jaws, we get no such differentiation. Because of the shark&#;s mechanical limitations, it&#;s never able to fully reveal its separate jaw muscle. Instead, it just chomps and chomps like it&#;s in a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, repeatedly snapping its teeth together in the same pattern rather than expanding its mouth. Check out this grisly scene of Quint getting devoured for a prime example of its oral bluntness:

Whereas Bruce merely knows how to gnaw its jaws up and down on Quint&#;s abdomen, a real great white would be able to latch on to the hapless shark hunter and jostle him back and forth like a dog toy or, to quote a newspaper&#;s account of the first documented shark attacks in US history (and a direct inspiration for Peter Benchley&#;s novel), shake him &#;like a terrier shakes a rat.&#; Just look at how one feisty fish goes to town on this inflatable boat.

In addition to the markedly different movement of Bruce&#;s jaws, there&#;s also their appearance. Because the top and bottom of an actual great white&#;s jaws aren&#;t separated, but part of one giant mass of muscle and bone, there isn&#;t a pronounced line between its upper and lower sets of teeth. In Bruce&#;s case, though, you can see that the jaws are split into two distinct halves, resulting in a bold line that divides them. Every time the big guy takes a bite, the halves squish together, as if the shark is being puppeteered (which it kind of is).

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Outside of the freakishly large size (fat head, fat body, fat everything) and workmanlike jaws, Bruce&#;s other prominent physical difference comes in his fins. A regular shark&#;s fins are made of ceratotrichia, filaments of elastic protein that allow the dorsal and caudal fins to move back and forth when swimming, zig-zagging through the water like a rudder. Bruce&#;s fins have no such flexibility. He only swims in a straight line, his first dorsal fin a monolithic triangle that hints at the equally bulky creature below. And that&#;s the scientific fallacy of Bruce in a nutshell: a lack of mobility. If a real great white is a honing missile, able to deftly recalibrate its path depending on the movement of its prey, Bruce is more like a battering ram.

But like I said, these inaccuracies end up enhancing the horror of the film rather than detracting from it. The villain of Jaws shouldn&#;t move like other sharks because it&#;s not like other sharks. Contrary to popular belief (at least in the &#;70s), most sharks don&#;t embark on an insatiable quest to consume as many humans as possible. The shark in Jaws, on the other hand, is a machine (Richard Dreyfuss&#; Matt Hooper even uses that exact term when describing it), a singularly minded entity not unlike Michael Myers from Halloween, the T-800 from The Terminator, or Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

All of these antagonists are predatory approximations of normal human beings &#; stronger, colder, and more instinctual than the real McCoy. Because the shark in Jaws possesses these same machine-like traits, it has a darker, more alien quality to it than an actual great white. Like The Terminator prowling a nightclub or Chigurh entering a gas station, Bruce doesn&#;t look quite right in his environment. He&#;s robotic, yes, but it would be just as scary to be trapped in the water with a robot shark as it would an actual shark. It would probably be scarier.

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For proof of which version of the fish produces more nightmare fuel, look no further than Jaws&#; iconic underwater sequence, when Hooper squares off against the apex predator in an expensive yet ultimately useless shark cage.

Once Hooper is submerged, he sees the shark coming at him from a distance. This time, we&#;re seeing an actual specimen filmed by shark experts Ron and Valerie Taylor. The real-life fish&#;s movement and silhouette are ghostlike, more phantom than clunky cyborg. It swims past Hooper and seemingly de-pixelates into the depths. As someone who&#;s viewed great whites from a shark cage, I can attest that this is accurate &#; there&#;s a majesty to the creatures as they glide past you, so peaceful that it&#;s hard to imagine them attacking anything with the animalistic fury for which they&#;re known.

But in the very next shot, the shark reappears as a hulking animatronic to ram Hooper&#;s cage, its head squarer, its movement rougher, its force more relentless. As the sequence continues and Hooper narrowly escapes the crushed enclosure with his life, the footage toggles back and forth between real shark and mechanical shark, snapping from gorgeous to terrifying several times in just a few frames. The dichotomy isn&#;t jarring &#; the constant shifting of appearances gives the sequence a surreal, nightmarish quality &#; but it&#;s certainly a testament to which version of the beast is more viscerally unsettling, and more in line with the shark&#;s darkly prophetic treatment in the film.

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Let&#;s not forget that this is an animal whose presence eclipses the livelihood of an entire town. Benchley even pops up as a news reporter to remind us that there&#;s a cloud looming over Amity, &#;a cloud in the shape of a killer shark.&#; Although the line reads like purple journalism, it also accurately describes the villain of Jaws &#; a great white that, thanks to its complete lack of elegance and complexity, becomes a true force of nature.

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