Let's be honest: vacuuming is not the bulk of the work. Vacuuming is a victory lap that can only be performed after somebody's gone around picking up all the junk off the floor – a task that Roborock's flagship Saros Z70 is starting to take over.
It's the robovac with a robot arm. You know the one. There is only one – so far. It's the logical next link in an evolutionary chain of home automation that'll one day let us all live like Roman emperors, flinging banana peels and togas gaily left and right and watching as our domestic slaves scurry to clean up after us.
In that sense, as Dan Carlin once pointed out, the kitchen of the future definitely looks uncomfortably like the kitchen of the past.
Robot arms do not come for free. The Saros Z70 is a very expensive robovac, and there are performance penalties too; the arm takes up space that could otherwise have been used for a bigger dustbin or some extra battery in a super-compact chassis.
Despite that, this machine does an outstanding job of being a regular robovac. With its built-in lights and dual cameras, as well as all the usual lasers and radars and whatnot, it maps my home out quicker and more accurately than any vacuum I've tested to date. Roborock's app is genuinely impressive and pleasant to use.
The robot's also got an impressively low appetite for charging cables – although it's by no means perfect on this account and did still yank a powerbank off my bedside table a couple of times. And just as I'm sitting here praising its general tendency to respect your belongings, it's just eaten a sock in the bathroom and choked on it.
I'm a big fan of the way it detaches its mops and leaves them in the base station driers when it knows it's going out to vacuum – that's a neat touch. It means carpets don't get wet, and mops don't get dirty until they need to. Mind you, it doesn't always seem to work, and I've seen several messages telling me one mop failed to click back in over the last couple of months.
The Z70 can also pop wheelies, which appeals to me. Roborock has fitted it with an "AdaptLift" chassis that acts like hydraulics on a low-rider, raising the front or rear high enough to cross 1.6-inch (4-cm) thresholds or climb out of the odd tricky situation.
It's not quite as good as the Narwal Freo Pro when it comes to long hair tangles – I've had to clear a couple – but it's certainly better than earlier machines I've used. And it's got extendable arms that pop out to get right into corners, with the anti-tangle side brush and the spinning mop pad.
It empties its own dustbin, measures out its own mopping fluid, cleans its own mops and base station with 80 °C (176 °F) water, and dries itself with warm air. It deploys an enormous 22,000 Pa of suction, which is enough to make me wonder how long it'll be until these jiggers can lift off and vacuum the ceiling. As I say, it does a ripping job of being a regular robovac.
But that's not why folk buy this thing, and that's not why you're reading this review. The question at the heart of it is: does it clean up for you? Does it do the thing?
And the answer is: um, yes, a little bit, but exceedingly rarely, and only under an extremely strict and mysterious set of conditions.
When I say rarely, I mean that in the month and a half I've been running this thing, I waited several weeks before seeing a single message saying it had picked something up and moved it. At that point I couldn't figure out what it had picked up, or where it had moved it to.
Then, about a week ago, I heard a yelp from my missus. I ignored this – she's a frequent yelper with a strong enough startle reflex that she regularly shocks herself in mirrors. But this particular yelp was followed by a text message with the following image:
Ladies and gentlemen, it had done the thing! And not by halves – I wear a size 12 4E extra-wide. The first shoe that'd fit me was built by a fellow called Noah. The Z70 had busted out its robot arm and hoisted one of these barges aloft.
I rushed out to the hallway to witness the spectacle, but by the time I got there, the robot had dropped the shoe on its own head and couldn't figure out what to do about it, so it threw an error. Curses.
Several days later, I was finally able to catch it in the act. I was in my daughter's room when I heard it make a weird noise, and managed to get my phone camera running as the momentous event – and the robot arm – unfolded. It picked up a shoe, held it aloft like Simba at the start of the Lion King for all to witness, then ... turned around 360 degrees in a jerky celebration dance before putting the shoe back down exactly where it picked it up from, and wandering off to repeatedly headbutt a laundry basket.
You can hear my excitement turn to dismay in the following video:
Now let's step back for a moment. This machine has demonstrated it can recognize large black shoes as well as small pink shoes, in an unfamiliar and chaotic real-world environment. It can deploy a robot arm and angle it well enough to get a grip on each of these complex, deformable shapes and lift them up, completely autonomously – and it's had the cojones to try this in strange people's houses.
In my case, it hasn't yet taken these skills to the next level and followed through on its promise of putting shoes in the designated shoe space, or putting rubbish in its little designated bin thing – but it's certainly the first robot I've had in my house that could recognize items and pick them up, and that is genuinely impressive.
I've held off and held off on writing this review, because it seems to me the Zaros S70 might just be a few software updates away from showing its true potential. The hardware seems terrific, but this is the very first machine of its kind, and early adopters are supplying great swathes of diverse real-world data for Roborock's AIs to train on as we laugh at this goofy robot dropping shoes on its head.
We've all seen in the last couple of years how quickly an AI robot can move from its wobbly first steps to a surprising level of competence, given enough data to chew on. And that's the play here for Roborock – get machines like the Saros Z70 out there learning how the world works, and get a leap ahead of the competition. I wouldn't be surprised if it's losing money on these early bots hoping that the data is worth the price.
As a tech reviewer and a person generally interested in the evolution of new technologies, I love this part of the learning curve. The future seems clear – robots will be smarter and more capable than humans in nearly any field I can imagine. Maybe I like laughing at these AI toddlers the same way I've enjoyed the beautifully weird things my own kids did as they figured physics out ... Kids and robots alike, they're all gonna grow up to be better than us and put us out of work. I laugh while I still can, and you should too.
On the other hand, if I was a customer who ponied up the full, whopping US$2,599 sticker price for a next-gen robovac that clears the floor before it cleans it ... well, I wouldn't be laughing quite as much right now. I'd wanna see a lot more of that arm.
But this thing made its commercial debut in May, and it's only just turned July, and if these recent shoe-nanigans are any indication, it does seem like the Z70 is already starting to learn and flex its capabilities. There's a decent chance this becomes a surprisingly capable machine by Christmas, and the robot arm proves much more than a gimmick.
There's also a decent chance it doesn't, or that Roborock messes something up on the privacy side and this machine ends up back in the headlines for the wrong reasons. Not everyone will be willing to share huge troves of information about the layout, contents and condition of their home with a foreign company, but that's certainly part of the deal for early adopters, because the cameras are imperative for item recognition and handling.
Personally I'm along for the ride and very curious to see how this little fella improves. And in a house like mine, there will certainly be no lack of crap on the floor for the Z70 to train on. You're welcome, lil buddy!
Source: Roborock
