Roborock Saros Z70: how good is the first ever robot vacuum with a mechanical arm?

Lorenz Keller

23.8.2025

Translation: Julia Graham

The Roborock Saros Z70 has an integrated mechanical arm that tidies away socks, slippers and hankies while cleaning. While it’s fascinating from a technical point of view, the device unfortunately isn’t fully developed.

There’s a slipper in front of the robot vacuum cleaner. Tension mounts. What will the Roborock Saros Z70 do? It seems to think, then repositions itself again. Suddenly, the flap at the top of the round device opens. A mechanical arm slowly extends. It grabs the slipper in slow motion, lifts it and takes it to the defined storage area. The robot gently sets it down and gets back to its cleaning work.

This is the first robotic vacuum cleaner with a mechanical arm that can tidy away obstacles. You can see how this works – and how well – in the video above. For English captions, go to Settings > Subtitles/Cc > Auto-translate > English. I’ll go into details here and examine the robot’s other features. The mechanical arm is just a spectacular extra, as the appliance’s primary purpose is to clean floors.

How the mechanical arm works

The Saros Z70’s mechanical arm isn’t activated by default. You have to do this in the settings after installation. Here you can choose whether the robot cleans the areas it tidies up and whether it sorts the items itself or whether you select what it does with them in the app.

For sorting, I select two areas in my flat on the map. It puts the shoes it’s found in one area and all the other items in the other. Roborock even provides a small bucket I can use as a depot. A good idea in theory – but only in theory, as we’ll see.

As a gimmick, I can operate the robot arm manually via the app. But I’m not meant to do anything stupid with it. The mechanical arm pinches quite a bit, as I discover when I test it on my finger.

This is what the mechanical arm can do in theory – and in practice

According to the manufacturer, the Z70 recognises three categories of objects: fabrics such as socks and cloths, paper balls and shoes. Roborock promises that there will be continuous updates for the mechanical arm. At the moment, however, I can only test what’s available.

And this is sobering in two respects: the scope of application is severely limited. The robot only recognises things that are most likely to be lying around my house, namely cat toys, in exceptional cases. Most of the time, they’re ignored.

It usually recognises socks, scarves or shoes correctly, which I can check in the app. But far too often, it can’t get hold of things. For instance, it didn’t manage to grip a single dusting cloth when I tested it out. It has more luck with socks and shoes.

But once it’s picked up an object, this doesn’t mean it’ll put it in the intended place. Slippers are set down next to the storage area, sometimes even somewhere else in the room. Even the socks only end up in the container in a few cases. What’s doubly stupid is that if the robot places an object down in front of itself, it can no longer reach the next object.

In the video, you can see that the Z70 only recognised and correctly placed two out of five objects. In another big attempt, it transported four out of seven shoes, but only two ended up in the storage area. Not a single cloth found its way into the container, but the Roborock did put two next to it. It couldn’t even grab three out of five socks and scarves. When it came to cat toys, the robot only considered one out of six test objects worth transporting – and deposited it half a metre next to the depot.

So, while the mechanical arm is technically fascinating, in everyday use it hardly offers any additional benefits. It’s more efficient to tidy up the flat yourself.

Does the mechanical arm have any disadvantages?

At first glance, I don’t see any drawbacks. The Z70 comes with all of today’s standard features. It even climbs over two to three centimetre high thresholds, the same as the brand’s other top models.

The robot is only eight centimetres tall – equal to or even one centimetre less than many of its competitors. Around ten per cent of the interior space is taken up by the mechanical arm, but this doesn’t have a major impact on the capacity of the dust container or battery.

So far, so good. But then as I’m testing the robotic vacuum, it emerges that with the arm function switched on, it takes much longer to clean. The Z70 took 72 minutes to clean two rooms with a total area of 35 square metres – partly because it was trying to clear away a ball track for cats, which was completely hopeless given the size.

In my normally tidy home, it took around twice as long as other models that also recognise obstacles but simply avoid them and don’t want to clear them away. In other words, it suddenly takes almost two minutes on average per square metre instead of a maximum of one minute.

The Z70 is also just a robot vacuum cleaner

Because of the gripper arm, it’s easy to forget that the new Roborock model is primarily a vacuum robot, i.e. it’s meant to clean the floor as well as possible.

The Saros Z70 can certainly keep up with the current top models. It navigates quickly and precisely, when it can concentrate on cleaning. This can be seen, for example, during installation when it takes 13 minutes. While that’s not the best time, it’s the fastest for a Roborock.

The Saros Z70 boasts excellent room layouts. I just have to separate the half-open office and the hallway. Again, no Roborock model has ever done this so well.

There’s also a first: this is the only time I’ve seen a robot vacuum cleaner not simply scan through the glass of the closed balcony doors and assume there’s another room there. Instead, it almost correctly classifies this area as outside the living area and designates it «conservatory». No competitor has been able to do this before.

The robot has high suction power and a brush so hair doesn’t get tangled. It uses two round, rotating mops for wiping the floor. It can discard them in the base station when not needed. Depending on the cleaning task, the Z70 starts the chassis, mops and/or brushes. A mop and the side brush can also be extended to clean edges and corners.

The mops and the docking station are washed with water heated to 80 degrees and then dried with air heated to 55 degrees. Depending on the setting, the system automatically dispenses a suitable cleaning solution from a 590-ml-capacity tank.

The overall cleaning performance is excellent and on a par with other top Roborock models such as the Qrevo Curv.

The noise level is also good. Despite its high suction power, it remains below average at 61 decibels during standard cleaning.

Price – and perspective

The Saros Z70 costs just under 1,700 francs according to the official recommended retail price. In our store, it’s available for 200 francs less, at least at the start. This makes it the most expensive robot vacuum in our range at the time of testing.

This is a problem, because overall it hardly cleans better than other top models. Let’s take the internal competition, for instance: the Roborock Saros 10 and the Qrevo Curv provide similarly good cleaning performance but are significantly cheaper.

The surcharge for the mechanical arm isn’t justified at the moment – even if it is technically fascinating. There is, of course, potential for development, with the manufacturer wanting to increase the number of objects that can be recognised and tidied away. Precision should also increase with updates. However, none of this is relevant for my review, as I can only try out what’s currently provided.

The question is also whether Roborock has programmed the right application for the hardware. Perhaps it would’ve made more sense to solve another everyday problem with the mechanical arm first. I open all the doors in my flat to make good use of the robot hoover. However, dust and dirt remain behind the doors, where the robot can’t reach. But it could perhaps move the door with the mechanical arm, clean behind it and then push the door back again. For me, that would be much more of a reason to justify the high price.

In a nutshell

Fascinating mechanical arm – but not fully developed

The Saros Z70 gets four to five stars for cleaning performance, it cleans well and thoroughly. This robotic vacuum is also equipped with all the extras and can even climb over thresholds that are two to three centimetres high.

The Z70’s special feature that comes at a hefty surcharge is the integrated mechanical arm. It’s used to tidy away shoes, textiles and scrunched up balls of paper – in theory. In practice, this function wasn’t sufficiently developed at the time of testing. Too many objects are left lying around, and the device is too imprecise when it comes to placing things in designated places. What’s more, carrying out these extra tasks takes far too long.

Pro

• Fascinating mechanical arm technology
• Puts shoes away quite well
• Excellent cleaning performance
• Mechanical arm doesn’t affect other features

Contra

• Mechanical arm not usable for everyday tasks
• Expensive
• Cheaper, equally good alternatives exist
• Increased cleaning time with mechanical arm

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Roborock Saros Z70

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Lorenz Keller

Senior Editor

Lorenz.Keller@digitecgalaxus.ch

Gadgets are my passion - whether you need them for the home office, for the household, for sport and pleasure or for the smart home. Or, of course, for the big hobby next to the family, namely fishing.

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