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Roborock Saros Z70 Review: This Robovac's Robotic Arm Is a Swing and a Miss

Roborock’s much-hyped vacuum/mop with an arm doesn’t do many of the things it’s supposed to do very well.

When the robot encounters an object that it recognizes as something it can clear, it announces, “Sorting item,” and then a plastic panel on top opens up, and an articulating arm with a pincer pops out. It actually did a fairly good job recognizing and picking up balls of paper (though it often failed to see them on my patterned rug), and in the odd cases that it missed, it would make a second attempt and grab it. The Z70 is supposed to have “Intelligent Dirt Detection,” which will cause it to go back and re-clean an area that it senses as particularly dirty, but I never saw this happen, and it often left messes in its wake, then returned to the base declaring itself finished.

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