The list of things that robot vacuums can do right now continues to grow. They can make an accurate map of your home so they don’t bump into things. They can empty themselves and recharge themselves. They can reach under your couch to clean up crud. Many have dual mopping-vacuuming functionalities to wipe up your dog’s muddy footprints.
One thing most robot vacuums cannot currently do is pick stuff up off your floor. Running a robot vacuum can save you a lot of time and energy, but it often requires spending 10 to 20 minutes frantically running around trying to defuse robovac booby traps my moving or picking up cables, shoelaces, and stray hair ties.
This year, Roborock won the race to launch a commercial robot vacuum that has an extendable arm that can pick up small bits of clutter in its way, thus becoming the robot butler of your dreams. The Roborock Saros Z70 has this extendable arm with grasping pincers that the company calls the Omnigrip. I screamed when I saw it.
Spin Me Right Round
In my testing, a robot vacuum is only as useful as its navigation system is accurate; all the suction power in the world won’t help you if it can’t find its way out from under your couch. I’ve found Roborock’s navigation systems to be consistently pretty accurate. The Saros Z70 uses a combination of sensors for navigation. There’s an array of 3D Time-of-Flight sensors to measure the distances between objects, and AI-powered RGB cameras to identify obstacles and to decide when to deploy Omnigrip. (The arm stays folded and stowed in a small bay on top of the vacuum when it’s not in use.)
Omnigrip has five separate axes, so it can twist and turn itself both horizontally and vertically to grip items delicately in its tiny pincer grips. Right now, it can pick up anything that’s under 300 grams, or slightly less than a pound—so, items like tissues, socks, or even a sandal.
To use Omnigrip, Roborock customers activate it through the app. When the Saros Z70 moves through your house, it identifies potential objects that it can lift while it’s cleaning, and then circles back around to pick them up and put them away when it’s done. In the app, you can choose the areas in your home where Omnigrip operates, how it should behave, and where it should place things it picks up.
Because it’s a little freaky to be napping on the couch as a robot vacuum extends its arm out to pick up tissues from around the floor, the vacuum also includes both a child lock and a safety stop button to immediately turn it off should things go awry.
As with its previous iterations, Roborock reported that the robot vacuum is certified according to the TÜV Rheinland privacy and security standards, which means that a third-party organization evaluated the robot vacuum’s security protocols to ensure that pictures of your home or your body won’t end up hacked and on the internet. No images are stored in the cloud.
Among other features, the vacuum can also be sold with the multifunctional cleaning mopping and self-emptying dock, and the onboard RGB cameras mean that it can also function as a pet camera to take video of your pets. (Roborock representatives told me that you would soon be able to use the Saros Z70 and its retractable arm to play with your pets when you aren’t at home.) It will also be compatible with the Matter 1.4 protocol, which makes it more interoperable with the other smart home devices in your house. (It’s already compatible with Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri Shortcuts, and Google Home.)
I Get Around
Roborock gave WIRED a demonstration of the Saros Z70 before CES, which was a little anticlimactic given that I had talked myself into a breathless hype beforehand. The Saros Z70 doesn’t currently bustle around your house, tying your ties and muttering helpfully like a maid or a butler. Instead, during my demo the Omnigrip took several minutes to consider whether or not to pick up a single dirty gray sock.
Still, that’s way better than getting the sock stuck in its roller brush and leaving an alert on my phone while I’m out grocery shopping.
The Roborock Saros Z70 isn’t the only disturbingly capable robot vacuum we’re expecting this year. Dreame debuted a prototype of a stair-climbing vacuum at IFA last year, showing a robot vacuum with a mobile arm on the bottom that extends to hoist the machine up ledges as high as 6 centimeters. (Very few stairs are that short; however, this is a great deal higher than the other robovac with a chassis-lifting mechanism, the Roborock QRevo Curv, can manage.) The the first Dreame vacuum with this tech, the X50 Ultra, is already available for preorder in Taiwan.
We’re also expecting to see other stair-climbing robots in the coming days, meaning that a robot vacuum will soon be able to traverse your house from floor to floor. Don’t need a robot that can creep up and down your floors automatically? You can control this year’s new Switchbot K20+ Pro like a remote control car.
It sounds convenient to have an AI-enabled bot with built-in cameras that can move independently around your house. And it is, but it can also be a bit distressing. Suppose you’re at home playing Scrabble with your kids, and the robot vacuum suddenly emerges from its docking station and turns its camera towards you. Is that it your husband checking in? Someone else? Imagine lying in bed, trying to relax with a good book about DAOs and NFTs, and suddenly hearing your robot vacuum grindingly humping its way up the stairs to where you sleep. It’s enough to make you want to shut the vacuum up in a closet forever.
Or maybe you can just acknowledge that the home is an incredibly complex and dynamic environment for any appliance to work, especially one that has to navigate an ever-changing landscape of shoes, socks, and Lego bricks. I think this is where the next big hardware and software leaps will take place—not in overpriced virtual reality headsets or chatbot-enabled pins that struggle to download updates, but with devices that are trying to solve the very real problem of how to not constantly live in filth. It’s hard to get upset about that.
