Roborock's new robot vacuum-mop hybrid will grab your attention — and your stray socks.
The Chinese maker of high-end cleaning tech debuted the Roborock Saros Z70 Sunday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas after about seven years in the making. The forthcoming hybrid robovac features a jointed, twisting "OmniGrip" appendage that can pick up and move certain small objects out of the way. Roborock calls it the "first-of-its-kind mass-produced foldable robotic arm."
The launch marks a shift from conventional object avoidance technology to object removal technology, with the goal of making a robot vacuum that's more autonomous than ever for care-free, do-everything-for-me cleaning.
In a demo, the Mashable team got to see the Saros Z70 depart its dock to fetch a balled-up sock and place it in a short basket before redocking itself. It's pretty cool — but if you can afford it, ask yourself this: Why don't you just hire a maid?
Roborock Saros Z70 design: The clawww
Weighing in around 11 pounds, the Saros Z70 is a matte black disc-shaped device with a slim profile. It lacks a LiDAR tower — a protruding circular bump filled with sensors, common among modern robot vacuums — and instead navigates with the help of built-in "Starsight" sensors and cameras around its circumference. (This allows it to get under more spaces and clean beneath furniture.) These cameras turn off when it's docked, per a Roborock rep, but users have the option to turn it on for surveillance purposes. The rep said its footage encrypted and stored on the Saros Z70 itself rather than through a connected service, so your data never exits the device.
The Saros Z70's robotic arm is housed under a shiny door on its surface that automatically lifts and slides backwards to unleash the appendage. The arm has five axis that can twist, as well as a pinchy, two-pronged claw at the end of it. There's a child lock and a safety stop button near the arm's base in case of emergency.
On the underside of the Saros Z70, you'll find a new anti-tangle FreeFlow brush, a set of wheels that can elevate to overcome raised lips between rooms or the edges of carpets, and mopping pads. These pads are both retractable and removable — users can have the Saros Z70 ditch them in its dock if it's only going to be cleaning hardwood floors, which is a new feature for the Roborock lineup.
How the Roborock Saros Z70 works
Roborock says the entire Saros Z70 cleaning cycle happens in three parts. First, it does a sweep of a room while marking any nearby objects it's able to lift, then returns to its dock. Next, it heads out again to move the objects it has identified out of the way. It then wraps up the cycle by returning to clean the spots where the objects previously sat.
Users have to enable its OmniGrip arm in the Roborock companion app — it won't be activated right out of the box — but from there, they can pick which objects the Saros Z70 grabs and exactly where it puts them. (Our demo did not include a run-through of these settings.) At present, the Saros Z70 is capable of listing four different kinds of objects weighing up to 300 grams: socks, paper, small towels, and sandals. Support for other types of clothing and shoes as well as pet toys are in the works.
The Saros Z70 boasts a whopping 22,000 Pa of suction power, which the company's rep called an industry record. For reference, Mashable's current favorite robot vacuum — another Robobock model, the $1,599.99 Qrevo Master — clocks in at 10,000 Pa of power. This thing sucks... apparently. We didn't get a chance to see it actually vacuum anything up.
The potential is there — but the price is silly
In our demo, the Saros Z70 was programmed to move out of its dock in a straight line, grab a sock, and place the sock in a short basket before returning to its dock. It was able to successfully put the sock in the basket — so long as the sock had been placed in a very specific spot, otherwise its arm would miss. Notably, it also struggled to properly redock itself every single cycle, getting close to its parking spot but never right on the mark. It would say something in Mandarin that roughly translated to "action failed" every time it tried to return home, and I kind of felt bad for it.
According to the Roborock rep, this programing was chosen because of the constraints of our setting: Our demo took place in a small hotel suite, and others were apparently being conducted in convention center booths throughout the week. It couldn't be wandering off.
I think these circumstances sold the Saros Z70 short, because it really does seem like a neat device if it reaches its full potential from the standpoints of pick-up-ability and sheer power. That said, I'm not quite sure who's going to be buying it: Roborock's rep couldn't tell us an exact price, but suggested that it would sell for around $2,000. (High-end robot vacuums that are on the market right now cap out around $1,600, such as the Qrevo Master.) If you're someone who can afford such a luxury, I don't see why you wouldn't just hire someone to pick up your socks and vacuum for you. To own one seems like more of a flex than anything.
The Roborock Saros Z70 is currently in mass production and slated for an April release. We'll have a full review of it once it hits the market.
