The Robot Vacuum With an Arm Just Got Much Cheaper. It's Still Not the One to Buy.

The most talked-about robot vacuum of the last two years just became a lot more affordable — and that is the best argument yet for buying something else.

Roborock's Saros Z70, the first mass-produced robot vacuum with a five-axis mechanical arm, launched in May 2025 at a $2,599 list price and briefly climbed to around $2,600 after 2025 US tariffs, making it the most expensive robovac on the market by roughly a thousand dollars. A year later, the shine has worn off the price tag. Vacuum Wars listed it at $999.99 as of July 19, 2026, and it is widely available in the $1,300 to $1,700 range elsewhere — less than half its peak. The problem is that every dollar it has shed only sharpens the same question reviewers asked at launch: what, exactly, is the arm for?

The Arm Is the Whole Pitch. It Still Barely Works.

The Z70's OmniGrip arm folds out of the top of the robot, identifies clutter with a camera, and is supposed to pick up objects up to 300 grams — socks, tissues, small toys — and either move them aside or tidy them into a bin you designate in the app. It is a legitimately novel idea in a category Gizmodo rightly calls plagued by "sameness."

The execution has not caught up to the concept. Reviewing the Z70, Gizmodo's Brent Rose ran more than 40 sorting tests and got the arm to drop a paper ball into its box exactly once, with a "zero-percent success rate" on slippers. His verdict: "Putting a robotic arm inside a robovac is great idea, but the Roborock Saros Z70 comes up short in execution. Maybe version 2.0 will work properly." He scored it 2.5 out of 5 and called Roborock's first attempt "a swing and a miss."

Later testing, after the firmware updates Roborock promised, tells the same story. Vacuum Wars — which still handed the Z70 a Most Innovative award for its ambition — found the five-axis arm "worked only about half the time in our tests." TechRadar's headline verdict was blunter: the vacuum "has an arm, but it's not yet all that handy yet," praising the manual remote control while flagging the automated arm as buggy and "still has a little way to go" on autonomous pickup.

The Vacuum Underneath Got Worse, Not Better

Here is the part that should give any shopper pause: to make room for the arm, Roborock swapped the twin-roller brush that made its recent models excellent for a smaller single roller — and cleaning suffered for it. Gizmodo found the Z70 more prone to crushing crackers and cereal and leaving crumbs behind, where the split-brush siblings "slurped them up with little difficulty." Vacuum Wars scored the Z70's raw cleaning performance at 2.93, below the 3.58 average of the robots it has tested. The obstacle avoidance is genuinely excellent and the mopping is strong, but you are buying a vacuum whose fundamentals regressed so a party trick could exist.

Where This Leaves Buyers

A price cut is only good news if the underlying product is good, and the Z70 is a fascinating experiment rather than a dependable cleaner. Tellingly, Roborock's own Saros 10R — the near-identical model without the arm — keeps the better brush, costs less, and is the one Gizmodo rates highest in the lineup. If the arm is not the reason you are shopping, it is pure downside.

For the money the Z70 now commands, the machines that actually top the rankings clean more reliably: the community-voted number one, the Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete, and the Roborock Saros 20 both pair elite suction with fully self-maintaining docks and no experimental hardware to babysit.

Buy the Z70 if you want a glimpse of where home robotics is heading and can treat the arm as a bonus, not a feature. Everyone else should see where it stands against the vacuums people actually recommend on our Best Robot Vacuums list.

Common Questions

How much does the Roborock Saros Z70 cost now?

It launched at a $2,599 list price and briefly reached about $2,600 after 2025 US tariffs, making it the most expensive robot vacuum on the market by roughly $1,000. It has since fallen sharply. Vacuum Wars listed it at $999.99 as of mid-July 2026, with other retailers hovering in the $1,300 to $1,700 range depending on color and stock. In other words, it now sells for less than half its peak.

Does the Roborock Saros Z70's robotic arm actually work?

Partially, and mostly not autonomously. The OmniGrip arm can pick up objects up to 300 grams — socks, tissues, small toys — but reviewers found the automatic sorting unreliable. Gizmodo managed to get it to drop a paper ball into its sorting box once across more than 40 tests, and had a zero-percent success rate with slippers. Vacuum Wars said the arm 'worked only about half the time.' The manually controlled remote mode works better but is more novelty than daily tool.

Is the Roborock Saros Z70 worth it?

For most buyers, no — not even at the lower price. The arm is genuinely innovative but still unreliable, and independent tests found the core vacuum cleans worse than cheaper Roborock models because of a redesigned single-roller brush. If you want the newest home-robotics tech and understand you are paying for a work in progress, it is interesting. If you want the best-cleaning robot vacuum for the money, look elsewhere on our list.

What is the difference between the Saros Z70 and the Saros 10R?

The Z70 adds the OmniGrip mechanical arm; the 10R does not. Otherwise they share most of the platform, but the 10R keeps the twin-roller brush design that reviewers praise, while the Z70 switched to a smaller single roller to make room for the arm. Gizmodo calls the 10R its highest-rated robot vacuum, and it costs meaningfully less — which is exactly why the arm is hard to justify.

What is the best robot vacuum in 2026?

On Gavler's community-ranked list, the Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete sits at number one, followed by the Roborock Saros 20. Both pair top-tier suction with fully self-maintaining docks and clean more reliably than the Z70 for less money. See the full ranking on our Best Robot Vacuums list.