Life is full of paradoxes. For example, I want my home to be spotless, but I do not want to clean. Some people might respond to this challenge by attempting to recruit indentured servants, or tricking a witch into cursing household objects into sentience and autonomy (both of which are frowned upon). However, the sane among us have the joy of turning to fancy pants robot vacuum cleaners to solve our problems.
The Roborock Saros 10 is the successor to last year’s Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, which I loved until around a year into using it, when it suddenly started eating all my cables after an update. I was so pleased when I set this model up, and it didn’t try to eat a single weird thing in my chaotic home (aside from a single leaf, but I think that’s more on me).
What sets the Roborock Saros 10 apart from other robot vacuum cleaners is that it’s really short. Less than 8cm short. Its little navigation hat is also retractable, allowing it to go under lower furniture than almost any other robot on the market. The only downside is that it’s extremely expensive and still isn’t quite as good as a person with several hours of free time and professional-level tools.
Table of contents
- First impressions
- Specifications and price
- Design
- Mopping
- Vacuuming
- Navigation
- Who is the Roborock Saros 10 for?
First impressions
The Roborock Saros 10 is a sleek and attractive machine. It’s clearly designed to live in the homes of people with enough disposable income to buy a $3,000 robot, and sit amongst designer furniture and on shiny, polished concrete. Roborock’s redesigned auto-empty station is sleeker, with the (small) water tanks now hidden under a lid, making it easier to pretend the unpleasantness of the dirty water tank doesn’t exist.
The setup process was very straightforward, with the app guiding the user through everything. Once set up, you send the robot on a mapping expedition, which it completes quickly and with reasonable accuracy. It recognised the rough shape of my apartment, but designated everything as a bedroom, including the kitchen, hallway and both bathrooms.
Roborock Saros 10 specifications and price
| Robot dimensions with laser distance sensor retracted | 350 x 353 x 79.8 mm |
| Robot dimensions with laser distance sensor extended | 350 x 353 x 93.5 mm |
| Dock dimensions | 440 x 409 x 470 mm |
| Mop technology | VibraRise 4.0 Mopping System |
| Navigation type | LiDAR |
| Battery life | Up to 220 minutes (in quiet mode) |
| Suction power | 22,000 Pa |
| Price (RRP) | $2,999 |
| Warranty | 24 months (in addition to your Australian consumer law rights) |
| Official website | Roborock Australia |
There’s a lot to unpack there, but the main thing is how short this beast can be, while still having good navigation and impressive suction.
The VibraRise 4.0 Mopping System is much like the 3.0 system, using a large vibrating plate with a cloth attached and a smaller round mopping foot that spins to get in the corners. The difference between the generations is that the 4.0 can exert a bit more downward force to do a better cleaning job.
It still needs to go back to clean its plates every 15 minutes, so it’s not just wiping dirty water about, but given it does that without any input from the user, that doesn’t really matter.
Design
This is a very beautiful, premium-looking robot vacuum cleaner. For the price, you’d want it to be, but that’s not always a guarantee. What’s more is that in addition to being beautiful, it’s also functional.
The new auto-empty station is sleeker and cleaner, but it’s also more obvious how to open the hidden compartments to empty the dustbin and fill/empty the water tanks.
The slightly smaller water tanks in the station are a little vexing, but for some, it might be a reasonable trade-off for it looking a bit nicer. However, having to top up the water every 3-4 cleans is bothersome and means I have to interact with the machine more than I’d like.
On the vacuum cleaner itself, the touch buttons for pause, clean and return to base have been updated to be more stylish. It’s clear that this is now a robot designed to look good, as well as making the floor look clean. It’s less jarring in a contemporary home.
Mopping
For my home, which is largely a mix of wooden floors, tiles, and a toddler hell bent on covering the entire place in chia pudding and porridge, mopping is the most important aspect of any robot vacuum cleaner.
Like most other premium flagship robot vacuum cleaners on the market, the Roborock Saros 10 is designed for maintenance mopping, rather than cleaning up spills. When faced with freshly spilled porridge, the Saros 10 just kinda spread it around a bit. Same with tomato sauce and milk spills. It could lift some of the mess, but spread the majority of it. It can’t exert the same downward force as a human hand holding a cloth, and the cloth on the mopping plate can only absorb so much.
The best way to imagine it is if you gently wiped a cloth through a spill once and then kept moving that dirty cloth around for 15 minutes. It’s not nothing, but it’s not going to fix a decently sized problem. You still need an actual mop, or a wet-dry vacuum cleaner (which Roborock also sells) for that kind of clean. Some robot vacuum cleaners that use roller mops instead of vibrating plates make bold claims about the ability to actually clean spills, but I have not yet been able to verify that effectiveness.
What the Roborock Saros 10 is really good at is keeping the floor clean from the detritus of everyday life. The sweat from your bare feet, the skin that you shed, the bit of water that landed on the floor when you carried the pot of pasta over to the sink, etc. Not the big spills that you notice, but the quiet grossness that builds up over time. And, for that purpose, the Saros 10 is excellent.
As I mentioned, I have a toddler who is walking and crawling all over the floor and helping me realise how gross everything is as she licks and bites it. Having my floor be as clean as possible is now a higher priority for me than ever before. So, having a robot that maintains a base level of cleanliness by mopping it every day is wonderful, and the Saros 10 is noticeably better than last year’s Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra at mopping.
It’s all about expectations. The Roborock Saros 10 largely does exactly what it’s designed to do, and for many, that will be enough.
Vacuuming
For a robot vacuum cleaner, vacuuming is kind of the important thing: it’s right there in the name. The Roborock Saros 10 is up there with some of the best and most effective robot vacuum cleaners I’ve tried on my medium-pile rug. I filled that bad boy with oats, and the Saros 10 was able to extract most of the mess on the first go round.
What makes the Saros 10 so extra good is the new DuoDivide main brush, which is two brushes instead of one, reducing hair tangles. This is becoming more and more common at this level of robot fanciness, but it’s still good to have. Living in a house full of women is wonderful in every way, but it does mean that our vacuum cleaner always has to deal with a lot of longer hair, which can get tangled in lesser robots. The Saros 10 just guides the hair into the middle of the two brushes, thanks to their corkscrew shape, and then yeets the hair into the bin.
22,000Pa of suction is very impressive for a robot, and it shows in how well it cleans. It sucks in the way you want a vacuum cleaner to suck, and not in the way most entry-level robot vacuum cleaners suck.
What I really like is that when it’s up to vacuuming my rug, it first returns to its base station to remove its little mopping feet, so it doesn’t get the carpet wet. Then, once the rug has been vacuumed, it returns to put its mopping feet back on. It’s an impressive piece of engineering, and a thoughtful touch.
Navigation
Here is where things get a bit shaky.
To start with the good, the Saros 10 is an expert at rolling up to cables, inspecting them, and then walking away without eating them, much like the S8 MaxV Ultra did at launch (and then later forgot). As you can imagine, given my profession, my apartment is filled with far too many cables on the ground. Recently, the S8 MaxV Ultra has gotten caught on the wires of my daughter’s baby monitor every clean, so I was braced for a rescue. The Saros 10 just moves safely away, and I love that for us.
However, sometimes it gives cables and furniture too wide a berth. I would like it to still clean around the legs of my chest of drawers, even if it doesn’t crash into them. But instead, it doesn’t go within 10cm of them, for some reason.
The Saros 10 will also sometimes just skip rooms or areas for no apparent reason. This morning, for example, it had been instructed to clean the whole apartment, but after it had cleaned half the living room, it decided it had had enough for the day and declared the cleaning complete. While I find that to be a very relatable attitude, and an approach I have sometimes taken to cleaning my home, that is less acceptable in a $3,000 robot that doesn’t experience joint pain.
I expect that last problem will be solved in a software update down the track, but I can only report back on what the robot does now, not what it might do in the future in ideal circumstances.
For me, the most important thing is that I’ve only had to rescue it twice, once because it ran over a baby wipe that got caught in its wheel, and another time when it tried (and failed) to eat a leaf that fell off one of my indoor plants. Usually, robot vacuum cleaners in my home send out plaintive cries after they fail at eating a tissue, a baby sock, or a USB cable.
This may still be in the Saros 10’s future. But to have not needed to remove anything from the rollers after more than a dozen cleans is a very, very good sign.
Who is the Roborock Saros 10 for?
This is the robot vacuum cleaner for people who want the cleanliness of their floor maintained at any price. It’s a device that only requires a very minimal amount of input for the user, but performs a deeply useful service, so it’s good for people who don’t have time to clean their floors every couple of days.
The price tag of $2,999 is a little difficult to swallow, and makes it difficult to recommend to many people, but it’s very unlikely anyone will have to pay full retail price for it. At the time of writing, it was $2,499 at most retailers, thanks to the constant sales cycle we find ourselves in.
Whether the Roborock Saros 10 is for you depends on your budget, aesthetic, how gross your floors are, and how low your furniture is.
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