Roborock’s new robovac has a mechanical arm that can pick up your socks and maybe play with your cat too
- Roborock Saros Z70 unveiled at CES 2025
- First commercial robovac with a retractable mechanical arm
- Will go on sale in the first half of 2025
Robot vacuum cleaners are getting smarter and are the best robot vacuum cleaners of the moment can do all kinds of magical things. Unfortunately, these innovations are often in the software, meaning they can be a bit lost on the average consumer. That’s not the case with the Roborock Saros Z70 – which has a whole extra limb.
Yes, the Saros Z70, which was officially unveiled at CES 2025, has a retractable robotic arm that takes care of the cleanup for you. It’s called the OmniGrip 1.0 and it’s a world first for a mass-produced robovac.
I got a sneak preview of the Z70 a month ago and it was absolutely fascinating. The bot looks a lot like any other robovac, except for a mysterious shiny hatch located on the top surface. On request, this hatch opens majestically to reveal a mechanical arm with pliers at the end. The bot then looks for objects it needs to clean up (e.g. socks or shoes), picks them up and moves them to a new location. These pincers can extend and twist both horizontally and vertically to reach its prey.
You can set default behavior in the app, so that you can, for example, specify that anything the bot recognizes as a sock should go next to your laundry basket. In the same way, discarded shoes can also be moved to a specific ‘shoe area’, as can things like clothing or waste.
Not only is that a win because it’s one less task for you to take care of yourself, it also means a more complete clean since the bot has a cleaner floor to vacuum.
If the idea of autonomous robots with limbs makes you feel a little uneasy, rest assured: Roborock has a few safety features built in. All functionality of OmniGrip 1.0 is completely disabled by default; the owner must indicate via the app exactly how he wants the arm to work. You choose which objects the OmniGrip should communicate with and where they should go. If you don’t, he will remain behind the door permanently.
There’s a child lock and a safety stop button, and the pliers have a relatively low-tension handle – the maximum weight is apparently about the same as a pair of shoes. That means that even if he tried to take your cat away (and just to be clear, he shouldn’t), he wouldn’t be able to.
Speaking of which, Roborock is apparently working on a feature where the Saros Z70 can actually play with your cat while you’re away. If the cat wants to get involved, of course.
There’s always plenty of crazy tech at CES, so you’d be forgiven for assuming (as I did) that this was little more than a flashy prototype, rather than something ready for the consumer. Apparently not. Pre-production samples will go on sale this month, retail samples are scheduled for March 2025, and open sales are scheduled for the first half of the year (i.e. in the first half of the year, before the end of June).
Is this the future of robot vacuum cleaners? Maybe…
I saw a slightly older generation version of the Z70 – in fact not even the latest version at the time, but rather a traveling press event model that had suffered a war wound to the hatch as a result of some overzealous treatment in New York. Even without the latest software updates and a few glitches during the demo, it was undoubtedly impressive, and certainly like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the world of robot vacuums.
Is this the direction robot vacuum cleaners are heading? Maybe. I’m encouraged by the fact that this bot comes from Roborock, a brand that continually impresses us with its new launches, and that we can trust to deliver useful innovations that really work. We loved the Roborock Qrevo Curv, which came with quad-bike-style suspension to help it bounce over high speed bumps, for example.
While it’s exciting to see something completely new, realistically I suspect that its sister models, the Saros 10 and 10R, will be the ones people actually buy at the moment. The three options are positioned as joint flagship models and all three feature the latest and greatest technology from the rest of the Roborock fleet.
The 10 and 10R are similar, but the former uses a traditional LDS module for navigation, while the latter uses the newer StarSight system (introduced with the Qrevo Slim, and notable for not relying on a raised central puck, meaning that the overall bone profile may be slimmer). The Z70 is again similar, but with the all-important addition of the robo-arm.
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