Home Tech Robotic vacuum cleaners are now the little butlers of your dreams

Robotic vacuum cleaners are now the little butlers of your dreams

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Roborock Saros Z70 a 3D rendering of a black disc-shaped robot vacuum cleaner with an arm extended upwards

the list of The things that robotic vacuums can do right now continue to grow. They can make an accurate map of your house so you don’t bump into things. They can be emptied and recharged. They can look under the couch to clean the dirt. Many have dual functions of mopping and vacuuming to clean up your dog’s muddy paw prints.

One thing most robot vacuums currently can’t do is pick things up off the floor. Using a robot vacuum can save you a lot of time and energy, but it often requires spending 10 to 20 minutes running around frantically trying to defuse robovac booby traps by moving or picking up loose cords, shoelaces, and hair ties.

This year, Roborock won the race to launch a commercial robot vacuum cleaner that has an extendable arm that can pick up small pieces of clutter in its wake, becoming the robot butler of your dreams. The Roborock Saros Z70 has this extendable arm with grippers that the company calls Omnigrip. I screamed when I saw it.

Courtesy of Roborock

Make me turn right

In my tests, a robot vacuum cleaner is as useful as its navigation system is accurate; All the suction power in the world won’t help you if it can’t find its way out from under your couch. I have found Roborock’s navigation systems to be consistently quite accurate. The Saros Z70 uses a combination of sensors for navigation. There are a variety of 3D time-of-flight sensors to measure distances between objects and AI-powered RGB cameras to identify obstacles and decide when to deploy Omnigrip. (The arm remains folded and stored in a small compartment on top of the vacuum when not in use.)

The Omnigrip has five separate axes, so it can twist and turn both horizontally and vertically to delicately grab objects with its tiny grippers. At this point, you can pick up anything that weighs less than 300 grams, or a little less than a pound, for example items like tissues, socks, or even a sandal.

To use Omnigrip, Roborock customers activate it through the app. As the Saros Z70 moves around your home, it identifies potential items to pick up while cleaning and then circles around to pick them up and put them away when you’re done. In the app, you can choose the areas of your home where Omnigrip operates, how it should behave, and where it should place the things it picks up.

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