I want to get something out of the way immediately. The Saros Z70 has a robotic arm. A robotic arm that picks things up, moves them aside, and sorts smaller items into a bin. My mind genuinely boggles that I have this sitting in my home. A product that was on the floor of IFA as a concept not long ago is now doing laps of my kitchen every evening, answering to the name Rocky. That alone deserves a moment before we get into the details.
And now it becomes a divided tale. The Roborock Saros Z70, available in Harvey Norman for €1,149, is a bloody great vacuum. But the arm is a bit of a gimmick.
Design
The Z70 is genuinely striking in person – the Lamborghini of robovacs. It sits at just 7.98 cm tall, which is noticeably lower than most competing flagships, and that slim profile earns its keep in practice. It gets under furniture that other robots, like my old Eufy, simply cannot reach, low bed frames, the gap under the kitchen units that quietly accumulates crumbs for months.
On the Z70’s first run it went under my couch and out the other side utterly blowing my mind, before going under the drinks cabinet that never sees a robovac driving underneath it.
I’ve not seen these profile come with any trade-off either – no drop in power, suction power, mopping, functionality or navigation ability.
The dock that the Z70 calls home is as serious a piece of kit as the vac itself. The multifunctional dock handles auto-emptying, mop washing at 80°C, detergent dispensing, warm air drying, and more, all without you touching anything. It can go around seven weeks between dust bag changes under normal use. It’s the kind of setup that makes you feel the price is at least going somewhere tangible.
Functionality
Strip away the arm entirely, and you’re left with an exceptional cleaning machine. The mopping is impressive with just amount of water being used – you can tell the floor has been mopped without buckets of water being left behind. The hot water mopping offers adjustable flow levels and a mop that spins at 200rpm. The mops also come out from the machine to get into corners with very little of the floor missed.
One thing worth flagging is that the water tanks aren’t massive, so if you’re running frequent cycles you’ll find yourself filling and emptying more often than you’d like. I had to dial in the mopping frequency to keep that manageable. Also it’s worth getting robovac detergent too. When just using water, the dirty tank had quite a smell off it which has subsided now that I’ve bought some robovac specific detergent (important for foam management).
The navigation is where the Z70 really shines for me. It uses LiDAR combined with Roborock’s StarSight 3D system, and the result is mapping and spatial awareness that feels intelligent. The cameras on this thing are remarkable. Remote controlling it through the app is like having an extra mobile security camera in the house, you get a decent real-time view of whatever room you send it to.
That said, it still gets regularly stuck on my clothes horse. Daily, for about five minutes, until it wriggles free. I’ve used the obstacle avoidance training in the app to flag it as a no-go zone and that has helped, but it took some dialling in. The avoidance system can recognise and learn up to 50 custom objects on top of the 108 it comes pre-trained on, which is a useful feature once you know it’s there.
Voice control has become one of my most-used features. I make dinner at different times every night, meaning I can’t schedule a post-dinner run, but I always want Rocky to clean the kitchen once prep is done. I just say “Rocky, clean the kitchen” and off he goes to that specific zone, vacuuming and mopping in one pass. No scheduling, no app required in the moment. It fits around how I actually live rather than forcing me to live around it.
The arm
The elephant in the room so to speak. Honestly, it’s a bit of a gimmick. A brilliant, jaw-dropping, hard-to-explain-to-visitors gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless.
If it successfully picks something up half the time, it’s doing well. The five-axis OmniGrip arm can handle objects up to 300g and uses dual cameras and a weight sensor to avoid crushing things, which is thoughtful engineering. On a good day, Rocky will quietly relocate a sock to the provided sorting bin or shuffle a pair of shoes to one side.
On St. Patrick’s Day, with friends over, he grabbed a tea towel, draped it over his own camera, blinded himself, and swallowed it into the roller. He became the most entertaining guest at the gathering, even if for all the wrong reasons.
The arm’s capabilities expand through firmware updates moreso than on-device learning, so it is improving over time, but I feel this early run will always be limited. However, I hold out hope it will get better as a concept.
I knew going in that this is an early adopter product in every meaningful sense. The fact that something that existed as a trade show concept is now physically in my home, occasionally moving my shoes around, is still remarkable to me. People visiting always ask to see it working – I just have to manage expectations.
Coolness factor
As vacuums go, this is the coolest one I’ve ever had. First, when people come over it’s always a conversation starter. Friends who have no interest in tech whatsoever stop and stare when Rocky starts moving things around. The combination of LiDAR navigation, real-time remote viewing, voice control, and a physical arm picking up objects is genuinely sci-fi in a way that other robovacs, however capable, simply are not. If you’re the kind of person who finds this category of product interesting, the Z70 takes it to a different level entirely.
Broadly speaking, robovacs change your entire life at home. I really don’t want to come across disingenuous or overly dramatic here. We’re a no shoes in the house family. That means I often come down to make a coffee in the morning in my bare feet and felt dust everywhere. Becuase Rocky is cleaning over night, deepcleaning once a week and mopping every couple of days – the floor is nearly always immaculate – because I’ve tuned the cleaning cycles into my own life.
Value for money
At €1,149 from Harvey Norman, the Z70 sits firmly in premium territory. If pure cleaning performance per euro is the metric, you can find robots that vacuum more effectively for less, and for straightforward vacuuming and mopping without the arm, something like the Roborock Saros 10 is a little cheaper with much of the same technology minus the arm.
But the Z70 is not really selling you pure cleaning performance. It’s selling you the dock, the navigation, the voice control, the remote camera, and yes, the arm. For the extra €150-ish, you get one of the most talked about gadgets in home cleaning.
If you go in understanding that the arm is an early-stage feature that will keep improving, and you want the most technically ambitious robot vacuum available right now, the Z70 at this price is easier to justify than it would have been at launch. It is an extraordinary piece of technology. Just maybe keep your tea towels off the floor for now.
