ZDNET Highlights
- The full price of the Roborock Saros Z70 is $2,599, but it’s currently on sale for $1,999.
- The Saros Z70 is the first robot vacuum with a mechanical arm that picks up lightweight objects and cleans hard-to-reach areas
- This robot vacuum performs impressively well, but you can expect some bugs with the OmniGrip mechanical arm function.
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I’ve spent the last few years of my life turning my house into the closest version of a Jetsons house I can find, bypassing the mid-century decor and flying cars. Although I’m happy to report that many of the predictions made by the 1960s sitcom have come true over the decades, many remain unrealistic. the biggest? Rosie Robot.
Plus: Shelly’s new smart plug is at home with all major automation systems
Thankfully, a growing number of companies are uniting behind the effort to create home assistant robots. After being lucky enough to test Roborock Saros Z70 With a mechanical arm, I believe Roborock has a definite edge over the competition.
While other companies have developed a variety of home robots, the Saros Z70 is a multifunctional robot that marks an important step forward for the future of smart homes.
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The Roborock Saros Z70 is a premium robot vacuum and mop that has all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a flagship, plus a mechanical arm for picking up objects. And when reviewing this product let me immediately focus on this robotic grip.
When the robot is vacuum cleaning, it detects small obstacles that it can handle and picks them up. The robot then moves to a predetermined area to drop the object. Then, the equipment returns to the spot where the object captured and resumes cleaning the area.
The Saros Z70 comes with a Roborock bin that you can place in your home so that your robot can put soft objects in it. It is a rigid cardboard bin that resembles a small dustbin, often found under desks or in bathrooms. When your robot creates a virtual map of your home, you place the bin and add it to the map in the Roborock mobile app. You can also add a larger area for your robot to drop off other items like slippers and light shoes.
Also: This vacuum mop combo changed my mind about smart cleaners, and it handles pet hair perfectly
The biggest question is: does the mechanical arm work as intended? After testing it at home, I’m happy to report that it does – at least, most of the time. To test the OmniGrip mechanical arm, I set up ten obstacles around the house and did a thorough cleaning several times. I also cleaned a smaller area with fewer items. The robot vacuum sees the object and makes a sound signal to announce that it is going to extract an object. This deploys the mechanical arm and lines itself up to pick up the object.
The Roborock Saros Z70’s OmniGrip mechanical arm can be controlled remotely to pick up and drop objects at will.
Maria Diaz/ZDNET
Once the arm grasps the object, the robot moves to release it. It lines itself up with the bin or designated sorting area and releases the item, then retracts the arm.
In my tests, the Roborock mechanical arm picked up the intended objects 83% of the time. This is a huge number for a robot that is effectively introducing this type of technology to the market. This is also a huge number when you consider that the robot’s initial rollout has a very limited number of items it can recognize and pick up.
Roborock says the Saros Z70 currently recognizes socks, sandals, folded tissues and towels weighing less than 300 grams (about eight ounces), and new sortable items will be continually added via firmware updates. When I used only recognizable objects, the robot successfully grasped and moved 90% of the objects.
When I added other small obstacles like shoes, small cups, and plastic film, it captured 75% of the objects.
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As a robot vacuum and mop, the performance of the Roborock Saros Z70 is excellent – I have no complaints with it. This is one of the best robot vacuum and mop combos I’ve tested so far. It has the best obstacle avoidance feature I’ve seen so far, ensuring it doesn’t get stuck on random objects. Additionally, it has an extendable mop pad for cleaning near the edges.
Like the Saros 10 and Saros 10R, the robot also cleans thoroughly, so you can trust it to reach almost every inch of your home.
I encountered a few bugs in the robot’s OmniGrip performance, but I can’t blame Roborock for them. Besides the fact that no robot vacuum is perfect (and this one comes close to it), these bugs can be attributed to the relatively new nature of this technology.
Some bugs included the robot “forgetting” to simply vacuum and resume mopping after dropping an object, as well as dropping objects that were difficult to catch, such as children’s water shoes.
ZDNET’s shopping advice
Roborock Saros Z70 This is not the right robot vacuum for most buyers. Instead, this robot vacuum and mop is perfect for early adopters who enjoy testing out the latest cutting-edge technologies. As the first robot vacuum with a mechanical arm to become widely available on the market, you can expect to encounter bugs with the Saros Z70 – that’s natural.
Still, I was thoroughly impressed with the robot’s cleaning performance and OmniGrip technology. I was also impressed by Roborock’s rapid and widespread launch of this robot following its announcement late last year. The Roborock Saros Z70 is the next level in robot vacuum technology, and it’s pioneering the idea of a functional, multipurpose home robot you can actually rely on.
Also: I let my robot vacuum run on autopilot for 10 days while I was away – here’s the result
However, it is quite expensive. The Saros Z70 will vacuum and mop like the best robot vacuums on the market. However, you should know that you are not just paying for the robot vacuum; You’re also paying for the innovation of having robots in your home for the future.
