CES sets the stage for robot vacuums to reach new heights

There were a slew of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extendable mops, movable towers, and new navigation systems.

As the industry races ahead in its quest to find the best way to clean our floors, it can be hard to see the function through all the hype. I spent the last week in Las Vegas hanging with our robot friends to find out just how much better they’re getting. Here’s a look at all the new tech that came out and how it could help keep your floors sparklingly clean.

The main focus of flagship robovacs over the last few years has been obstacle avoidance. Adding AI-powered camera navigation systems has helped robots avoid getting stuck on socks, slippers, and toys, but it means they haven’t actually cleaned all of your floor.

The solution: adding a robotic arm to move the items out of the way. Roborock’s Saros Z70 and Dreame’s concept vacuum both showed off what a robovac can do, given a robotic claw on top.

Both companies say they have software that will allow you to designate where items get placed, letting the vacuum tidy up for you in a whole new way. Roborock said you can designate an area for the bot to put things it cleans up, and Dreame said its concept vac will be able to put specific items in specific places, such as cat toys by the cat bed or shoes by the front door. Neither demoed their app, however, so I didn’t get to see how this works.

The biggest limitation for these arms is weight: Roborock’s can only pick up light items up to 300 grams — it’s currently programmed for socks, tissues, small washcloths, and sandals. Dreame says its will be capable of up to 500 grams, which means it can tackle shoes ( a sneaker up a men’s size 42/9). But only Roborock actually demoed its robot picking anything up — and that was just a sock.

Dreame’s arm does look more robust. It’s bigger and thicker with a fatter pincer claw. But I didn’t get to touch it. I did get to play with the Saros Z70’s arm, and it felt surprisingly strong, especially for how slim it is.

What Dreame’s arm has that Roborock’s doesn’t (yet) are attachments. Dreame showed off a small toolbox that stored two brushes — a sponge for wet messes and a bristle brush. The idea is that the robot can attach these to its arms and then get into nooks and crannies the main robot can’t. I didn’t get to see the robot actually do any of this, though, so it’s all still a concept.

Robovac makers are adding appendages on the other side of their bots as well. Both Dreame’s concept vacuum and its new Ultra X50 have two little legs — small appendages that extend from under their body to lift them up.

They’re not articulating legs; they’re just small levers that help propel the bot up onto a step, and then its forward momentum knocks them down as it passes the step. The benefit here is navigating high room transitions, not really stairs. So, if you have a small step between your living room and kitchen or a high transition between the tile floor in your 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 larger heights with its tech — up to 6 cm. Sadly, this doesn’t feel like the precursor to actually climbing the stairs that I’d hoped for. That appears to be still an entire chassis redesign and several years away.

A less eye-catching trend that emerged at CES was around mopping. Ecovacs, Switchbot, and Narwal all debuted robot vacuums with roller mops that can extend outwards to reach along baseboards and into corners. This is a shift from the spinning, oscillating mops that have been popular for the last few years.

Roller mops started rolling out on the likes of the Eufy Omni S1 Pro and the SwitchBot S10 last year, and — in my experience — they are better than oscillating mops. They have a wider surface area and self-clean as they go, so they don’t have to return to the base frequently to clean their mops. But current models fail to cover all of your floors, as they can’t reach the edges, which most oscillating mops can as they extend out from the main body. Hopefully, these new extending roller mops will tackle this problem.

Ecovac’s model — the Deebot X8 Pro Omni — also adds a hot water tank to the robot itself, not just in 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 as it’s working.

The other innovation on the show floor that caught my eye was a mop-swapping station from Dreame (and its sub-brand Mova). This lets you designate specific mop pads for specific rooms. The robot will go back to the station and swap 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 out, but my initial impression is that the self-cleaning roller mop is a simpler, more streamlined solution.

The other big robot navigation trend this year is retractable lidar towers. Lidar has long been the preferred navigation tech for most robot vacs, 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 bots that can pop their towers down to get into more places. How well they’ll do when they’re under the bed without their lidar tower, however, is something I will need 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 bot that can seamlessly navigate around your home and know about the unruly rug tassels in the living room, rather than you creating keep-out zones in the app to make sure it doesn’t get derailed.

Roborock debuted a new StarSight navigation tech at IFA last year on its Qrevo Slim, which is designed to do exactly that. At CES, the company announced it’s bringing a more advanced version of StarSight to its Saros Z70 and Saros 10R.

According to Roborock, StarSight Autonomous System 2.0 ditches 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 floorplans and homes by using more sensors to feed the onboard AI.

While I had a poor experience with Ecovacs X2 Omni, which used solid-state lidar, I’ve been testing the Qrevo Slim for a while now, and it has been largely reliable. So, I’m excited to try out the more advanced version.

Ultimately, the goal of all these innovations is better floor cleaning with less intervention by us. All I want is a robot vacuum that can reliably and effectively reach every inch of my floor without me tidying up before it runs or having to rescue it from under a chair leg. From what I saw at CES this week, we’re getting a lot closer to that.