We’ve seen plenty of robot arms over the years, from industrial-sized monstrosities and commercially-oriented automatons to desktop-sized robo-limbs you can program to your liking. So far, though, we’ve never really seen robot arms integrated into everyday consumer products. That changes with the Roborock Saros Z70, which puts a robotic arm on top of a robot vacuum.
Why put a robotic arm on an autonomous vacuum? So it can pick up large items it encounters in its path, such as socks, toys, shoes, and whatever else your family has left strewn around the floor. Even better, it can drop all the items it picks up in a designated spot (e.g. a box or a basket), allowing your robo-vac to not just suction dirt and debris, but collect all sorts of items you have scattered around the house.
The Roborock Saros Z70 is equipped with a foldable five-axis mechanical arm that can pop out of a compartment on top and grab any object it encounters in its path. According to the outfit, the vacuum won’t actually use the arm on its first pass when cleaning an area. Instead, it will merely mark those parts of the house where it sees obstacles and keeps them in mind for later. Once it finishes with the first pass, though, it will do a second pass and use the arm to move obstacles out of the way, so it can clean the areas underneath them.
After cleaning, it will then move the objects to any of the predefined designated spots in its memory. For instance, it can put socks in a laundry basket near the bathroom, toys in a box in the living room, and crumpled tissues in the kitchen trash can. Out of the box, the device can recognize 108 different objects, although users can also program it to identify and classify up to 50 more items. According to the outfit, you can even ask the device where it put a specific item, since it keeps that data in storage.
The Roborock Saros Z70 actually comes with two cameras: one in front of the vacuum and another on the mechanical arm. Why does it need a camera in the arm? Apparently, it uses computer vision to identify where it can grip the object safely, which makes sense, since the arm camera can easily inspect the item from different angles. According to Roborock, the arm can lift items up to 300 grams (0.66 pounds), so it should be able to handle most common items people have scattered about.
As for the vacuum itself, the new device boasts a suction power of 22,000 Pa, which makes it incredibly powerful, all while having a chassis that can lift its front end when driving over cords and similar obstacles. It also uses this same lifting tech to exert more pressure to the spinning mop brushes in the back, which will, hopefully, lead to an even more effective cleaning robot. The device also notably ditches LiDAR, instead using AI-assisted cameras and a time-of-flight sensor that, the outfit claims, will improve accuracy and lead to better 3D mapping.
The Roborock Saros Z70 is slated to come out in the first half of this year. No pricing has been announced.
