The all new Roborock Saros 10: the robovac with everything

Roborock announced the new Saros 10 robot vacuum at CES earlier this year, complete with new technologies and new features to improve on their already impressive featureset.  

It is now available to preorder in Australia for $2,999 across Roborock Australia’s official retail channels, such as Roborock’s Official Online Store and other Participating Authorised Retailers. Pre-order customers will receive a $200 gift card, redeemable at the Roborock Official Online Store.

We’ve been using it for the past week or so and are very impressed.  

Design and Setup

The design of the Saros 10 is new and stylish.  The edges are less severe, and the cover of the vacuum is less shiny and looks elegant in its new matte finish.  The LDS module on the top of the robot is now smaller as well (and retracts into the vacuum to fit underneath lower clearances).

The home base or RockDock Ultra 2.0 docking station is also more compact and stylish, and it will better complement your decor. The water tanks are now hidden under a sleek lid and the mirror finish on the front is also consistent and a nice touch.

The setup on the Roborock Saros 10 is improved from the last time I set up a Roborock vacuum. The connection to the vacuum from your smartphone can use Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth, and Nearby Devices. This was seamless and incredibly quick—a vast change from when you used to have to take the vacuum a distance from your router so it would connect to the correct router frequency!

Mapping

Once you have logged into the app and the vacuum, the app automatically displays the option to perform a quick mapping. It certainly is a quick mapping, as it only takes five to ten minutes.

The app then draws and names the furniture and rooms it finds. Of course, you can change any of these if you prefer. If you name it correctly, you can easily use your smart home speaker to tell the vacuum to mop a certain room.

The app supports multi-floor maps so you can use it for any number of floors at your house.  

Cleaning

The vacuum’s cleaning and mapping include some of Roborock’s new tech and features: the RetractSense Navigation System, Upward Range Finder, and Wide-Angle Vision Module (why do companies have to give a brand name to everything?).

These all make cleaning super efficient. The Upward Range Finder precisely measures space height to tell the LDS module on top of the vacuum to lower into the vacuum while passing under low-clearance areas.  

The Saros 10 also includes Reactive AI 3.0 Obstacle Recognition, which uses AI to determine what the structures are in front of the vacuum (seen on the camera).  This is accomplished using an RGB camera and lateral structured light to give precise object recognition.  This provides for real-time object recognition while cleaning allowing it to easily avoid these objects, including loose cables and other irregular objects.

You can set the Saros 10 to take photos of objects that it encounters. While its naming is impressive at times (a power strip for a power board was an impressive find), it does occasionally struggle (a pot plant basket for a pet?).

The vacuum’s power is an impressive 22,000Pa of what they call HyperForce suction, allowing it to pick up more than ever before. In real-world tests, this was true, with it easily picking up loose items on carpets—something that sometimes takes a few passes with other, less-powerful vacuums.

The Dual Anti-Tangle System (another Roborock name) that the Saros uses is basically just two small rubber rollers underneath that spin in opposite directions to prevent hair and other threads from tangling in them. Sometimes, with some vacuums, this can be better on paper than it is in the real world. So far, I have not had any hair or other threads get caught in the rollers, so there may be something to this anti-tangle system.

The Saros 10 also includes a single FlexiArm Riser Side Brush to clean up all the way up to your skirting boards and furniture. I tested this out, and it worked as advertised, although at times, the brush only flicked the crumbs away from the skirting boards, and two passes were needed to pick them up entirely.

I have a couple of rugs that sit a couple of centimetres off the hardwood flooring, and some vacuums need a bit of a run-up to get over them. However, the Saros 10 has an AdaptiLift Chassis, which adjusts its height by up to 10mm, allowing it to move over steps up to 4cm in height. There were no issues at all, which is nice because the edge of one of the rugs is getting a bit worn from my other vacuum constantly trying to get over it.

In my real-world tests, the vacuum had no issues picking up breadcrumbs from the edge of the flooring (it took a couple of passes to get all of them) and other smaller and larger crumbs, etc., off the carpet. If you have exceptionally dirty flooring, though, I would always recommend two passes with the vacuum, even the Saros 10—but that is something you can easily set in the app.

Mopping

Many of us often forget that most of these robot vacuums also mop and this one is no exception.  In fact, unlike nearly all other robot vacuums, the Saros 10 includes detergent that it uses when you mop the floor.  I’m not entirely sure it does that much to the process of removing foodstuffs and mud from the floor. Still, with it being detergent, it will most likely aid in the cleanup of oily spills and also help kill more germs (detergent kills COVID-19, which is still a thing I have to deal with every day, although not at home).

For the fine print from Roborock, the Saros 10 includes VibraRise 4.0 technology and a “denser, more absorbent mop that enhances moisture retention for superior stain removal.”  It includes dual sonic vibrating zones operating at “4,000 times per minute, up to 8N pressure, and a 26% larger vibration area.”

This is all well and good in theory, but does it make much difference in real life? Yes, it does, albeit marginally. Fewer passes are required to remove stubborn spills, improving the mopping power, but not by much.

When vacuuming only and not mopping, the Saros 10 will detach the mop from the vacuum and the edge mopping function will only activate when required (when it is near an edge).  

All in all the mopping is effective and certainly an improvement over what these robot vacuums had a few years ago but is only marginally better than something from last year.

The RockDock Ultra 2.0 Docking Station

As mentioned above, the RockDock Ultra 2.0 advanced docking station is much more stylish and complements your home decor than the previous model.  

It includes 80°C Hot Water Mop Washing to give the mop a deeper clean, 60°C Dynamic Mop Washing to remove more germs after self-cleaning, and fast charging. The 6,400mAh battery takes 150 minutes to charge.

One thing to keep in mind is that mop cleaning can take some time and is not perfectly silent, so you may want to adjust the time it takes to clean when you don’t care for the disturbance.

Software

The Roborock app is incredibly intuitive. Once you set everything up at the start, you will rarely need to touch any of it again.  The settings are fairly extensive though but you can drill down to exactly what you want and then just run the vacuum as required.

Once the vacuum has finished cleaning, it will mark on the map where it ran into obstacles and capture images of that, be it cables, shoes or anything else.

Roborock has included the new AI-powered SmartPlan 2.0 on the Saros 10, and it sounds great. However, I’m not convinced it does all that much. Roborock says it will “identify floor types and room categories to create an ideal cleaning strategy.”  I used it anyway because it can’t hurt, and if it helps just a bit, it costs me nothing.

The Saros 10 also comes with its own digital assistant, which, like so many others, is relatively useless. It is normally just as easy to open the app can get it to do what you want first try, especially if you want to alter certain settings for that clean. It also supports Google Asisstant and Alexa control which is just as useful as Roborocks own assistant.

Should you buy this?

If you do not have or have not bought a robot vacuum for a long time and like to have your home in a consistent, stylish decor then yes you should buy this. It has every feature under the sun and cleans especially well.

The new features are great and make for a fast clean that produces great results. It looks good and cleans well: what else do you need? The hardware is impressive, with some smart features that enhance its ease of use.

Like so many other vacuums on the market, the decision to buy one is really determined by what you need and what your budget is. The Saros 10 from Roborock sits at the top of the food chain, not just in hardware and features but also price, with an RRP of $2,999AU. It is not cheap, but if it fits in your budget, I can recommend that it be amongst the one or two others that you should be looking at closely before spending your hard-earned.

The Roborock Saros 10 is available to pre-order in Australia from now until the 24th of March at $2,999 across Roborock Australia’s official retail channels, such as Roborock’s Official Online Store and other Participating Authorised Retailers. Pre-order customers will receive a $200 gift card, redeemable at the Roborock Official Online Store. It will begin shipping around that date.