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Over the past week, I’ve gotten a sneak peek at tons of smart tech being released at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). But the only tech that made me jump up and clap in excitement was the Roborock Saros Z70: specifically, the moment when the top of the Z70 opened up and a long robotic arm emerged. This arm can gently pick up a shoe, sock, or toy in the robot's path, and then gracefully deposit it in a location of your choosing.
For the past 18 months, I have not been coy about how much I like Roborock robot vacuums and mops, if you choose the top of the line models like the S8 MaxV Ultra and the QRevo MaxV or QRevo Curv. Among the reason for my devotion: Roborocks are more autonomous than other robot vacuum cleaners—they don’t get clogged or lost or stranded as often as other brands. Also, they seem to get the floor cleaner.
Yes, Roborock has a lot of models, but the company is aiming to streamline the confusion a little bit with a brand-new naming convention: Saros. Roborock has already released two robots under this new naming convention—the Saros 10 and 10R—but the Z70 will be the flagship.
The arm (officially called the OmniGrip) will be able to pick up six or so different items at a time, from socks to toys, and then, depending on what the AI identifies the object as, will drop it in a pre-designated spot. While it already recognizes 108 objects, the open-source AI model will let users identify and name 50 additional objects. In other words, the Roborock can now pick up after your family. You can ask the Saros where it last saw your kid’s missing sneaker.
If the idea of a robot arm emerging from your vacuum cleaner freaks you out, it won’t work until you set it up. One of the nice aspects about the arm is that future improvements to the arm are mere software updates. I asked if the arm would be able to help free the robot from a stuck spot, like it would on an excavator; while it can’t currently, future updates might make that possible.
As exciting as that is, it’s not the only upgrade in the Z70. Every brand I spoke to this week insisted that their vacuum would have “the highest suction power in the industry” but Roborock is going to win that battle, with 22,000Pa. To put it in perspective, plenty of robots I tested in the last year did an admirable job at less than 10,000Pa. There’s a question to be asked about how much we gain from this continued escalation of suction power—does it actually help debris, particularly large debris, move through the rollers so it will not get stuck?
The Z70 leverages the technology that we saw in the QRevo Curv, where the chassis can lift its front end to surmount obstacles like cords and rolled rug ends, but it will now use that same tech to exert more pressure on the robot’s back end, where the spinning mop brushes are located. That pressure is what has been missing from any robot vacuums released so far, and I, for one, could not be more excited. This could mean finally getting into depressions on tile, grout lines or getting rid of general griminess.
With Saros, Roborock is making a deliberate move away from LiDAR, which has been a navigation standard for the last year or two. LiDAR uses light to measure distance, but requires a “tower” on top of the robot, which is why most robots you see these days have a circular “button” on top of the machine to house the LiDAR. Roborock is moving towards AI-assisted cameras to navigate—specifically, the Starsight Autonomous System 2.0. The Saros is equipped with cameras on the robot and the OmniGrip, and those cameras measure the distance between where the robot is and the space in front of it, both vertical and horizontal. LiDAR “guesses” the distance, so it is less accurate. This new navigation includes Vertibeam, a lateral obstacle avoidance so the robot can vacuum around obstacles like power cords.
The Saros Z70 is also very thin, a smidge over three inches tall, so it will slide under your furniture, and includes all the features I love from previous Roborocks: hefty water tanks on the dock, a place for cleaning fluid in the dock, and very fast-charging (only 2.5 hours for a full charge). In news I’m less enthused about, Rocky, the on-board voice assistant, will continue to be present. I don’t find Rocky to be all that evolved yet, and he tends to respond to random phrases from my TV a lot, while not listening to me at all.
The Saros Z70 is expected to be released in the first half of 2025; there’s no pricing information yet.
