Roborock's Robotic Arm Vacuum Is Impressive, But Is It Useful In Real Life?

Robot vacuums have come a long way over the years, but I don’t think anyone expected we’d have these machines running around our homes with a robotic arm any time soon. Yet, here we are. The Roborock Saros Z70 has a built-in robotic arm that extends to pick up objects it finds, but after living with it for a couple of weeks, here’s why I think this idea needs a bit more time in the oven.

At the core of the Roborock Saros Z70 is a high-end, robot vacuum + mop. If you read our review of the rest of the Saros series, you’ll see what this thing is capable of.

Roborock Saros 10 Series Review: What’s most important in a robot vacuum + mop?

In summary, it has spinning mops for scrubbing the floors and tons of suction power to clean up debris. And, overall, it does a wonderful job. Cleaning was plenty powerful for my home’s needs with the two dogs within. The only hiccup I really noticed in general cleaning was that, for some reason, this model tends to get caught up on any sort of raised threshold more often than other vacuums I’ve tested. This led to some minor cosmetic damage to the wooden thresholds in my home, but the Roborock app has a way to avoid this (though it means skipping the cleaning around those areas). Like the Saros 10 and 10R, I also found it a little too optimistic about what it fits underneath, as it would get stuck under my couch and scratch itself until I set up a no-go zone in the app.

But cleaning is really just a footnote on the sales sheet for the Saros Z70. The headliner is the built-in robotic arm.

This arm is hidden beneath a door on the top of the Saros Z70 and extends out when it detects an item that’s in the way of cleaning. A bin is included in the box to give the robot arm a place to drop off those items and get back to the task at hand.

The first time you see this happen, it’s actually quite impressive. The robot will detect an item, get into position, and then unfold the arm to pick up the item. The claw at the end grabs it, the arm lifts it up, and then the whole machine moves to put the item away.

That’s when it works correctly, though.

In my experience, this has been a bit hit or miss. When leaving a sock on the ground, the robot would often ignore it. When it did find it (roughly 65% of the time), it would occasionally pick it up and just roam around the room for a while before placing it down somewhere else instead of in the bin. That’s what it’s supposed to do at first, technically. “Follow-up” sorting puts the item aside while cleaning and then puts it away when finished, but that second step was sometimes forgotten. There is an option to manually make the robot put things away, or even control it yourself.

Some fine-tuning improves the odds that it’s successful, but this whole thing feels very underbaked right now.

Another clear sign of this being in its early days is that Roborock limits what the arm can pick up. “Fabric” items can include socks or cloths. “Shoes” can include low-top shoes or slippers, and then it can also pick up “paper balls.” It won’t pick up, say, a kid’s toy, a dog’s ball, or a cable. That’s understandable, but it also defeats the purpose just a bit. If I’m always cleaning up those things, picking up a sock or two doesn’t feel like much more work. The main area I could see the vision here is with shoes, as we’ve all had times where our shoes ended up in the wrong place. Being able to assign a place for the robot to place these back is a genius and genuinely helpful idea, but it never really worked for any of my sneakers.

There are also some other aspects where the arm actually becomes useful. Roborock has supported the ability to use the camera in its vacuums for checking in at home. A cool, if a little creep idea. With the arm, you get a camera that can see from a new angle, literally. Yes, there’s a camera built into the arm. It’s ridiculous, but also cool and potentially useful.

If you have a dog in your home, though, this arm is basically a walking (driving?) nightmare. My dogs are fully used to robot vacuums at this point, but the arm coming out had the full attention of my youngest pup, Finn, to the point where he would start to get in the arm’s way. I’ll give Roborock a lot of credit for its build quality in that regard, as Finn’s interactions with the arm – including trying to grab what the arm picked up – had no impact on its performance. Cleaning the arm itself over time seems like it could be a headache, though.

Again, none of these downsides really come as a surprise. This is a brand new idea for the category, and the data collected while Saros Z70 is in action will fine-tune this functionality for years to come. I’d be shocked if the next generation isn’t drastically more capable, but I do think it’s hard to pay a premium for it at the moment. The extra $1,000 isn’t really worth it for most people, at least not yet.

That said, I am very glad that Roborock is actually selling this product. I’m not sure who’s in the market for a $2,600 robot vacuum with an arm, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. Like everything else in this industry, too, I’m sure it will get more affordable with time, and considerably better. In the meantime, I’m at least glad that this tech is packed into the same package as Roborock’s other stellar cleaners. If it were compromising cleaning for the sake of a robotic arm, that’d be a problem, but I’m glad to see that’s not the case.