Roborock Saros Z70 review: grasping the future, one sock at a time

Welcome to T3’s review of the Roborock Saros Z70, a hybrid robot vac with innovative robotic pincers that marks one of the boldest leaps yet in home cleaning technology.

Robot vacuum cleaners – and especially hybrid vacuuming and mopping autonomous bots of the sort we have here – have advanced at record pace over the past couple of years to the point that we now have models that boast vastly improved suction power, the ability to wet mop a hard floor, navigate a home without bumping into everything or riding slipshod over obstacles, and even climb over tall thresholds with relative ease.

But no-one’s ever thought of adding an autonomous robotic arm with pincers for tidying up stray shoes, socks and other lightweight obstacles. Ambitious, feature-packed and undeniably futuristic, the Saros Z70 sets out to push robot vacuums into entirely new territory. But is its cleverly conceived OmniGrip arm a genuinely useful innovation or is it just a daft folly with no real practical purpose? Let’s find out.

Roborock Saros Z70 review: price and availability

If you have the urge to splurge, you can purchase the Roborock Saros Z70 in the UK direct from Roborock, where it sells for a lofty £1,499. Alternatively, head to Amazon where it’s shifting for the same price to Amazon Prime members. Not a Prime member? That’ll be £1,799.

If you live in the USA, your best bet is Roborock direct, where the Saros Z70 retails at $1,999.99. Amazon US sells it, too, for the same price.

Roborock Saros Z70 review: robotic arm feature

The Roborock Saros Z70 features something no mainstream robot vacuum has attempted before – an arcade-style pincered robotic arm that gently extends out of a concealed hatch to pick up wayward socks, slippers, phone cables and tissues before dropping them in a designated place of your choosing. At least that’s the hypothesis because, despite having had this bot doing the rounds in my home for a number of months, the technology – and specifically the software running it – still has some way to go before I can fully recommend it as a genuinely functional addition to one’s household armoury of cleaning devices. Nevertheless, as a very adept notion of what the future of household floor cleaning might look like, this particular innovation is still an impressive opening salvo.

Where other robot vacuums simply avoid obstacles or skirt around clutter, the Z70’s five-axis OmniGrip arm allows it to physically interact with its surroundings in a way that feels genuinely futuristic. Neatly folded away into the top deck when not in use, the arm deploys smoothly when the robot encounters small items in its path, but only those already in its database. As of writing, its database lists just over 100 recognisable objects. However, firmware updates over the past few months have been few and far between so there are still many small objects that need to be added to make this system truly viable in a real world scenario.

Equipped with its own camera, LED light and precise weight sensors, the Z70’s twin pincers can swivel 360 degrees to grip and very slowly lift objects of up to around 300 grams in weight. The arm’s camera, meanwhile, allows the robot to not only identify clutter but to actively move it aside so it can clean underneath. In practice, the arm operates in tandem with Roborock’s advanced LiDAR-based StarSight 2.0 navigation system, using an array of visual and 3D sensors to map the environment and classify objects.

The design of the arm itself is quite a feat of miniaturisation – it can reach out about 10 inches, grasp things at varying angles and retract and close its top-mounted door with a level of fluidity that is very entertaining to watch. Likewise, the grip of its pincers is very gentle since it relies on intelligent pressure control to avoid causing any damage or injury to inquisitive kids.

Of course, this level of cutting-edge tech isn’t without its limitations. For instance, the system is designed for plain hard flooring or carpets and rugs with no patterns to confuse it. Similarly, it can’t handle large or heavy items and its decision-making is only as good as its object recognition, which isn’t very comprehensive.

As a result, it very often misidentifies irregular-shaped objects or simply ignores them altogether. It’s also frustrating slow to carry out the whole procedure of picking up an item and dropping it in its predesignated spot. Yes, I know one should never watch a robot work because it’s like watching paint dry, but this arm thingamajig is really, really slow, with a capital S. Still, hats off to Roborock’s tech bods for giving it a go.

Roborock Saros Z70 review: vacuuming and mopping features

The Saros Z70 is more than just a gimmicky slice of tech folly because, as you might expect from a highly-regarded brand like Roborock, the Z70 is first and foremost a dynamite robot vacuum cleaner and extremely competent wet mopping machine that will keep your floors looking spick and span on a regular basis with very little human intervention.

The Saros Z70 is just 7.98cm in height – perfect for reaching deep under low furnishings – and delivers an impressive 22,000 Pascals of suction power through its tangle-resistant brush system. Likewise, its twin spinning mop pads are very adept when it comes to mopping hard flooring, including the wherewithal to extend one of the pads by a couple of inches for effective corner cleaning.

The mops can also automatically lift up to clear rugs and carpets or detach entirely at the docking station when not required. And most impressively, the chassis itself can adjust its height to clamber over room thresholds up to 4cm height.

The Saros Z70 is equipped with twin cameras – one on the front of the body and another mounted on the arm – that provide visual navigation and object recognition, assisted by LED lighting for low-light scenarios. Beneath the skin, this bot uses Roborock’s extremely accurate LiDAR-based StarSight Autonomous System 2.0, a multi-sensor navigation array that scans the environment in high detail to map, identify and avoid obstacles in real time. This is complemented by the side-mounted VertiBeam system which allegedly improves the detection of cables, edges and awkwardly shaped items that might otherwise cause traction issues.

Like its stablemates, the Roborock Saros 10 and Saros 10R, the Saros Z70 comes with a gorgeous black mirrored dock which serves as a self-cleaning station that performs three tasks: charging the robot when it returns after a cleaning or mopping session; emptying the contents of the robot’s small onboard bin into the dock’s larger 2-litre dust bag; and thoroughly cleaning the robot’s two spinning mops using using hot water at 80˚C and warm air at 55˚C.

I’ve often complained about the poor aesthetics of most robot docks but I think this one’s aesthetically very pleasing and way more inconspicuous looking in a home environment, mostly because the mirrored finish reflects everything in front of it, making the dock almost disappear from view.

Roborock Saros Z70 review: performance

Roborock is a past master when it comes to autonomous vacuuming and mopping and this model most certainly doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it’s behaved impeccably well in most disciplines, including first-rate obstacle avoidance and an excellent ability at collecting bundles of pet hair without any of it becoming entangled in the robot’s brush system.

Likewise, the Z70 has a seemingly more powerful automatic bin emptying system than the Saros 10R, which can sometimes choke if ingesting too much pet hair. As a consequence, the Z70’s dock always empties the robot’s bin without blocking any of its suction tubes. That makes it a top choice for pet owners.

My partner and I are generally tidy and never leave socks, shoes, cables or rolled up pieces of tissue paper littering the floor. However, our two Labrador girls are on another level of messy and leave their soft toys all over the place. It was the spectre of having a robot that was capable of collecting loads of dog toys that got me so exited about this model in the first place.

Sadly, after many experiments using a variety of soft dog toys all under the 300g limit, the OmniGrip has only ever collected one – a small furry badger. It has basically skirted around every other toy I’ve placed in its path. Hopefully Roborock will add a comprehensive list of soft dog toy shapes to the Z70’s database because I think that this is a more viable reason for having it than collecting the odd stray shoe and sock. Speaking of which…

I also performed a multitude of shoe, sock and cable tests and the results were mixed. Sometimes it would interrupt a cleaning session by actually picking up a stray sock (you can see a sequence of images of the process in the above montage) while on other occasions it would simply scoot past the object or objects and carry on cleaning.

I discovered that the arm was most successful at picking up stuff already in its database, namely socks and screwed up balls of paper – stuff that I personally never have lying around. I also gave the arm a few goes in manual mode but the in-app virtual joystick controls were too clunky to give it any kind of wow factor. I admit to not trying out the new arm programming mode, mostly because I wasn’t keen on climbing yet another learning curve.

While genuinely innovative, the X70’s mechanical arm process was also achingly slow and not always on the ball at recognising or gripping irregular objects. As a consequence, cleaning cycles took longer than those of standard robots, as the Z70 sometimes needed to make several passes to detect, occasionally move and then clean around obstacles. Just as well you can turn the arm off in the always-excellent Roborock app.

In the broader context of robotic cleaning, Roborock’s OmniGrip arm does indeed represent a genuine leap forward. After all, it’s the first time a mass-market robot vacuum has attempted to bridge the gap between intelligent navigation and physical manipulation. While the results aren’t perfect, it sure has been an exciting glimpse into the future of home robotics.

Roborock Saros Z70 review: verdict

No question, the Roborock Saros Z70 is a striking piece of technology, blending powerful suction, very decent mopping, advanced navigation and an impressively shallow chassis for reaching under low-slung furniture.

However, while the concept of the headline-grabbing OmniGrip robotic arm is indeed a groundbreaking innovation, its execution, in my opinion, still feels experimental. By all means make a bee-line for this model if you’re an early adopter because it’s cleaning power alone is second to none. Just don’t expect any fireworks from the robotic arm.