I love a good robot cleaner. It takes away all the tedious jobs and frees up some time that can be better spent doing something more interesting instead.
Of course, the emphasis there is on the “good” part. There are plenty of robots out there that can actually make things feel worse rather than better, flicking dirt across your floor rather than vacuuming it away, or spreading food across the floor rather than mopping it away.
Now before anyone starts getting ideas, I don’t have impossibly high standards for floor cleaning. I don’t need things to be perfect; I just need it to be good enough that I don’t have to do the vacuuming and mopping every day. And for it not to leave a trail of cereal bits in its wake. Half-decent obstacle avoidance would be good. Bonus points if it avoids getting stuck on mats or under the table.
I don’t think that is asking a lot. I had even made my peace with the fact that the one thing that will take down a robot cleaner is a stray sock or cable, when the Roborock Saros Z70 launched in Ireland. Not only does it have a dose of AI built in to guide its way around your home, but the robot cleaner has a hidden weapon to make sure the sock clogs are a thing of the past: a robot arm that will pick up certain items and deposit them in a predetermined location.
If you have ever tripped over the robot vacuum that has eaten the post and stopped just inside the front door, or had to wrestle a Roomba for a sock that has clogged up its innards, you know how enticing this sounds. This could be life-changing. Or it could be a total gimmick.
A lot depends on the Z70 being a decent vacuum and mop too. There is little point, after all, in it being able to clear the obstacles in its path if the cleaning isn’t up to the job.
But first, what exactly do you get with the Z70? It comes with a decent-sized base station – big enough to not require regular intervention but not so big that it takes over the room – that will charge your robot, auto empty the dust bin and keep the mop topped up with water. It will also clean the mop pads after use and dry them.
The mop pads are not only the spinning kind, but they also move out from the unit to get as close to the skirting boards and kitchen units as possible. It mops the most thoroughly of any of the robot cleaners I’ve tested, although not quite capable of taking over from humans full-time just yet.
[ A robot to wash your windows? Spring cleaning with a tech twistOpens in new window ]
The Roborock app gives you plenty of choices when it comes to cleaning. Once your floor is mapped, you can create routines for certain times of the day, or for individual rooms. For example, vacuum the diningroom and then mop after meals, or a quiet run around the hall in the evening once the children have gone to bed. There is almost too much choice, leaving me stuck with a sort of choice paralysis at the very start of setting this up.
It also comes with a small cardboard bin that will hold whatever items the robot arm rescues from the floor. On set-up, you designate its location on the map, and set another area in your home for shoes (the mat at the back door worked for me). In theory, the Z70 should deposit items in one of those two locations.
The first time it encountered a shoe, things didn’t go too well. The robot sized up the obstacle and began to deploy the arm. Then there was a lot of repositioning as the automatic system tried to get to grips with the best angle, before it gave up, packed itself away and carried on with the clean. The next time was more successful, with a crowd cheering it on as it dropped a Nike runner on the mat.
You would, however, be quicker doing it yourself.
It did a better job on cleaning, although with hard floors throughout the ground floor of the house, there wasn’t a lot to tax the Z70. While the mopping and vacuuming performance was mostly decent, there were some occasions where the robot just downed tools. Stopped, waited, gradually ran down the battery and then died. Perhaps it was some sort of symbolic protest at being overworked. Maybe it found an obstacle it couldn’t get past. We have yet to solve that particular mystery.
Good
The cleaning was decent, which is the main thing I’m looking for from a robot helper. When it didn’t need the mop pads, it detached them automatically and left them at the base station rather than dragging them around the room.
The arm, when it works, is a useful addition although not essential. It managed to drop shoes in the right location on more than one occasion, although it was a rocky start. You can also manually control the robot arm – best done sparingly.
Bad
The arm is a bit of a gimmick. It didn’t always manage to grab things correctly, and it occasionally got itself tangled up in whatever it was trying to tidy away. The extra space for that robot arm could be better used for a bigger dust bin or water tank.
There were times when the robot stopped for some unknown reason and waited, gradually winding down its battery until I came home. I could see where it was on the map; I just couldn’t do anything about it.
Everything else
The base station is a decent size, so you won’t need to interact with it too often. Though I suggest emptying the wastewater tank every couple of days, to avoid the obvious unpleasantness that leaving it for an extended period of time would entail.
The robot cleaner itself has multiple cameras that you can access – handy for finding the pets, or seeing exactly what is happening when your robot is cleaning a room – including one on the robot arm. If you are worried about surreptitious use of the cameras though, don’t be; when they are accessed, the robot will announce that remote viewing is active, loudly and at regular intervals.
Verdict
The robot helping hand may be a gimmick, but Roborock offers more reasonably priced cleaners that will do just as good a job.
