There were a host of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extended mops, movable towers and new navigation systems.
As the industry moves forward in its quest to find the best way to clean our floors, it can be hard to see function through all the noise. I spent the last week in Las Vegas hanging out with our robot friends to find out how much better they’re getting. Here’s a look at all the new tech that came out and how can help keep your floors clean.
Arms to get behind you
The main focus of flagship robots over the past few years has been obstacle avoidance. The addition of AI-powered camera navigation systems has helped robots avoid getting stuck in socks, slippers and toys, but that means they haven’t actually cleaned your entire floor.
The solution: adding a robotic arm to move things out of the way. Roborock’s Saros Z70 and Dreame’s concept vacuum both showed what a robovac can do, given a robotic claw on top.
Both companies say they have software that will let you determine where items are placed, letting the vacuum adjust for you in a whole new way. Roborock said you can designate an area for the robot to put things it cleans, and Dreame said its vac concept will be able to put specific items in specific places, such as cat toys next to the cat’s bed or shoes next to the door. front. However, neither demonstrated their app, so I didn’t get to see how this works.
The biggest limitation to these arms is weight: Roborock’s can only pick up light items up to 300 grams — it’s currently programmed for socks, beanies, small washcloths, and sandals. Dreame says it will be able to hold up to 500 grams, which means it can handle shoes (a sneaker up to a men’s size 42/9). But only Roborock actually demonstrated its robot picking up anything — and that was just a sock.
Dreame’s arm looks stronger. It is larger and thicker with a thicker claw. But I couldn’t touch it. I got to play with the Saros Z70 arm and it felt surprisingly sturdy, especially for how thin it is.
Dreame’s arm and Roborock’s arm are not (yet) attachments. Dreame pointed to a small toolbox that held two brushes—a wet mess sponge and a bristle brush. The idea is for the robot to attach these to its arms and then get into nooks and crannies that the main robot can’t. I didn’t get to see the robot do any of this though, so it’s all still a concept.
Climbing to new heights
Robovac manufacturers are adding attachments to the other side of their robots as well. Both Dreame’s concept vacuum and its new Ultra X50 have two little legs — tiny appendages that extend from underneath their bodies to lift them up.
They do not articulate their legs; they’re just little levers that help propel the robot up a step, and then its forward momentum knocks them over as it goes over the step. The benefit here is navigating the high passageways of the rooms, not actually the stairs. So whether you have a small step between your living room and kitchen or a high transition between the tiled floor in the bathroom and the carpet in your bedroom, these robots should be able to move between the two.
This is mostly just an extension of the chassis lift technology we’ve seen from Roborock, Shark and a few others. Dreame’s X50 Ultra adds greater heights with its technology – up to 6cm. Sadly, this doesn’t feel like the precursor to actually climbing the stairs that I’d hoped for. It appears to still be a complete chassis redesign and several years away.
More cleaning
A less eye-catching trend that emerged at CES was around cleaning. Ecovacs, Switchbot, and Narwal all debuted robot vacuums with roller mops that can extend outward to reach along baseboards and into corners. This is a change from the rotating, oscillating mops that have been popular in recent years.
Roller mops started rolling out on devices like the Eufy Omni S1 Pro and SwitchBot S10 last year, and — in my experience — they’re better than wobbly mops. They have a wider surface area and clean themselves as they go, so they don’t have to return to base as often to clean their rags. But current models fail to cover all of your floors, as they cannot reach the edges, which most rocking pads can do as they extend from the main body. Hopefully, these new extension roller mops will address this issue.
Ecovac’s model – the Deebot X8 Pro Omni – also adds a hot water tank to the robot itself, not just the base station. This means that not only can it clean your floors with hot water, but it can also keep its mop clean with it while it’s at work.
The other innovation on the show floor that caught my eye was a cloth exchange station from Dreame (and its sub-brand Mova). This allows you to assign specific cloths to specific rooms. The robot will return to the station and change its pads to use a fresh pair for the kitchen, say, after cleaning the bathroom. This can help with concerns about cross contamination. I’m interested in testing this, but my initial impression is that the self-cleaning roller cloth is a simpler and simpler solution.
Less lidar
The other big robot navigation trend this year is retractable lidar towers. Lidar has long been the preferred navigation technology for most robot cars, but that pesky tower on top can prevent them from getting under low furniture.
The Dreame X50 Ultra, Roborock Saros 10 and Mova V50 Ultra are all new robots that can collapse their towers to access more places. However, how well they’ll do when under the bed without their lidar tower is something I’ll have to test.
Lidar is also being augmented by more sensors and AI to help robot vacuums better understand your home. The idea here is a robot that can seamlessly navigate your home and know about unruly carpet tufts in the living room, rather than creating buffer zones in the app to make sure it doesn’t go off the rails.
Roborock debuted a new StarSight navigation technology at IFA last year in the Qrevo Slim, which is designed to do just that. At CES, the company announced that it will bring a more advanced version of StarSight to the Saros Z70 and Saros 10R.
According to Roborock, the StarSight Autonomous System 2.0 ditches the traditional Lidar for a dual-transmitter solid-state Lidar with 3D time-of-flight sensors for distance detection and AI-powered RGB cameras for navigation and maneuvering around obstacles. Roborock says StarSight helps the robot deal with more complex plans and homes by using more sensors to feed the on-board artificial intelligence.
While I had a poor experience with the Ecovacs X2 Omni, which used solid-state lidar, I’ve been testing the Qrevo Slim for a while now and it’s been mostly reliable. So, I’m excited to try the more advanced version.
After all, the goal of all these innovations is to clean the floor better with less intervention from us. All I want is a robot vacuum that can reliably and effectively reach every inch of my floor without having to tidy it up before it runs or having to rescue it from under the chair leg. From what I saw at CES this week, we’re getting a lot closer to that.
