Summary
- The Roborock Saros 10 is priced at $1,600, $200 less than its predecessor at launch.
- Easy to set up and maintain, the vacuum effectively cleans under furniture with retracting sensors.
- Impressive navigation capabilities with new features like the AdaptLift Chassis, but object recognition struggles on carpets.
From an anti-tangle brush to a highly efficient dock, I’m impressed by the slim Roborock Saros 10. Navigational enhancements such as the retracting sensor and lifting chassis allow for minimal human intervention. Along with its numerous successes, I’ve also noticed a few shortcomings on carpeting.
Roborock Saros 10
The ultra-slim and advanced Saros 10 features the revolutionary RetractSense Navigation System for thorough cleaning under low clearance areas and the certified Dual Anti-Tangle System to tackle pet and long hair. Enjoy uninterrupted cleaning with the industry-first Adapt-Lift Chassis, and keep your floors spotless with the Saros 10’s upgraded VibraRise 4.0 mopping system.
- Divided main brush excels at preventing tangles
- Offers extreme suction power that removes tons of pet hair
- Vibrating mop provides intense cleaning
- The Saros 10 can be controlled with direct voice commands
- Carpets interfere with object recognition and don?t get clean edges
- The chassis lifting can be clunky
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Price and Availability
Available in both black and white, the Saros 10 retails for $1,600. This is $200 less than their previous flagship, the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra sold for at launch. The package includes the robot, the RockDock Ultra 2.0 with two removable water tanks, and two included dust bags, one of which arrives pre-installed. If you want to use detergent, you will have to purchase it separately.
A Nice Looking and Functional Set
Both the Saros 10 and the dock arrive fully assembled. The dock is pretty sleek, with a slightly mirrored tempered glass front panel. I was happy to be wrong after expecting this material to show tons of fingerprints. You don’t need to open the front panel often, but all it takes is a light press on the front panel to access the dust bag and the detergent tank.
The top plastic panel opens to access the water tanks. The material looks nice but doesn’t feel as premium as the front panel’s glass. The tanks are very convenient to access. Aside from adding clean water and dumping dirty water, there isn’t much you have to do with the RockDock Ultra 2.0. It does so much by itself.
The mop is automatically washed and dried, the water tank is filled with water and detergent, and the dust bin is emptied. When you are just vacuuming, the dock removes the mop until the vacuum is finished with its routine. The lifting chassis avoids wetting rugs to the best of its ability, but having the mop removed eliminates that possibility. The only change I would like to see within the dock is the addition of a max fill line on the clean water tank.
The vacuum itself looks quite nice as well, with a textured pattern on the top. While the LiDAR Sensor (LDS) module is so prominent on past Roborocks, the design is more subtle and neat on the Saros 10 and isn’t even on the Saros 10R. When the LDS module retracts into the body of the Saros 10, it is a clean black circle that is flush with the top surface. Additionally, the vacuum has a magnetic top panel that easily removes to access the dustbin and filter.
There are three touch-sensitive buttons on the top of the vacuum. The water droplet icon can be used to put the robot in mop-only mode or as a child lock. The power button, in addition to controlling the power, is used as a power level indicator and flashes red when under 15% charged. The home icon sends the robot to the dock, or if it is already on the dock, it washes the mops. When cleaning, you can tap any of the buttons to pause cleaning.
The light bar on the top is nice just to have on. It indicates the Wi-Fi connection status and the voice assistant’s status. When talking to the assistant, the light changes lengths and makes it feel like it is talking back.
Getting started is very easy. After making an account on the Roborock App, available on iPhone and Android, you pair the device with a QR code and are then ready to auto-map the space. You can add furniture and obstacles once the map is made.
Impressive Navigation That Improves Over Time
There are so many features tucked into this compact little robot. The already slim height of 3.68 inches reduces down to 3.14 inches when the LDS module retracts. When combined with the shallow profile, this robot can clean under more furniture than I expected. I love watching the module retract before it cleans under my coffee table or entertainment center. It looks like a little submarine going to tackle some cleaning, especially when its fill light shines to better see obstacles in the dark.
The Saros 10 is Roborock’s debut of the RetractSense Navigation System. In addition to the LDS module, an additional upward sensor detects the height of furniture as it vacuums underneath it. The Saros 10 will prevent itself from getting wedged under furniture it can’t quite come out from.
I had some issues with this navigation system the first few times it ran. When the robot went to clean under my entertainment center, it rotated half under the console with the module out until the side of the module rammed into the furniture. It did so two or three times before the module retracted. My best guess is that the upward sensor is having a hard time detecting the bottom mesh surface of the entertainment center, but it is the same material as my coffee table which the robot goes under with ease.
That concerned me, but the issue lessened over time as I ran SmartPlan. This cleaning mode uses AI to improve its understanding of your space. It wasn’t just the entertainment center that noticed improvements. In the beginning of testing, there were times when my robot tried to round the corner between my kitchen and living room, and kept getting caught up on my stationary pet feeder. It never actually bumped into it, but it did come close, reverse, rotate slightly, realize it was still too close, reverse again and rotate more. The more I run my Roborock, the better it becomes at smoothing out this interaction.
AdaptLift Chassis allows the robot to climb over small thresholds without getting stuck. The Saros 10 has handled the inch transition between my hard flooring and my carpet with ease since day one. The mechanism could still use a bit of refinement, though, but that’s how most new features work when they are first launched.
It’s a bit clunky when addressing an obstacle that is not head-on. I’ve had past vacuums get stuck on my desk legs. The lift mechanism of the Saros tries to get itself off of the desk leg, but if one wheel is on the leg and the other on the floor, it takes a bit of trial and error by the robot to get itself unstuck. I’ve set no-go zones around both desk legs and haven’t had a problem since.
Object Recognition vs. My Carpet
I was excited about the Reactive AI 3.0 Perception System prior to getting my hands on this Roborock. While very impressive on hard floors, the detection struggles on carpeting. Numerous obstacles are mapped with high confidence percentages from the AI even though the guesses are wrong. Shoes are consistently detected on both surfaces, but cable detection is nearly nonexistent on my carpets.
After watching the Roborock push right into the small coil of a lamp cable, my interest peaked. On the first run of the bot, my cables on my wood floor were nicely avoided, so why did my cable coil get run over in my carpeted bedroom?
I laid one cable across the floor in the living room and one in the entryway. The cable was ignored on the living room carpet but avoided in the entryway. Since the cord laid on the flooring had a little bit more dimensionality with bumps in it, I tried that one on the carpet, too. Again, nothing but ramming into it.
When an obstacle is detected, it shows up on your map in the app. You can turn on the Obstacle Photos option to see exactly what the obstacle is. You can choose to ignore that obstacle in the future or avoid it.
A Fantastic Clean, Minus Carpet Edges
The split brush design functions really well. By spinning at different speeds, the two brushes funnel hair into the center, where suction pulls it right into the dustbin without getting tangled. I’m a few weeks into testing this robovac, and I haven’t had a single tangle. I never thought this day would come!
There is some serious power here with up to 22,000Pa of suction, over double the power of the previous generation. You can select this absurdly high suction power of Max+ when setting up a routine or zone cleaning, but it will drain your battery a lot quicker. I have to say, I don’t see a major difference in what is picked up when vacuuming on Max suction power rather than Max+, so I tend to opt for Max since it can clean my whole space in one charge. Either way, the high suction power is one feature my carpets love. When vacuuming carpeting or rugs, both the mop and the side brush lift and out of the way.
On hard surfaces, the FlexiArm Riser Side Brush lowers and extends to reach along baseboards and into corners. It directs particulates towards the center brush where suction then does the rest. While it does extremely well at removing dirt from the edges, I have noticed a few times when debris is not quite flung far enough by the brush. Since the arm is extending itself out from the robot, it has to move particles further in order to get sucked up by the vacuum. Sometimes, the particles don’t quite make it.
The Saros 10 utilizes an ultrasonic vibrating mop pad and an extending arm. Our team loved the VibraRise 3.0 Mopping System on the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra and has since improved it to the VibraRise 4.0 Mopping System. It vibrates up to 4,000 times each minute. The 26% larger mop area is nice, but it’s not as notable as the mop’s ability to apply increased pressure to grime detected by AI. When encountering a mess that doesn’t lift easily, the Omni wheel on the back of the robot rises up to create more downward force on the front mopping pads. This feature is so neat and is absolutely worth turning on in the app’s AI Laboratory.
Most of my space is loving its clean from the Saros 10, but the perimeter of the carpeting hasn’t received the same amount of care. There are areas that have a slight fur buildup where the carpet meets the baseboard since my cat sleeps there leaning against the wall. No robot vacuum I’ve used has been able to clean this well, so I still have to walk around and pluck these black fur crease lines from the edges of my light tan carpet.
I was hoping that you could manually select to have the FlexiArm Riser Side Brush run when vacuuming carpeting. I know it wouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is on hard floors, but it might be able to catch loose pet hair just enough.
The Roborock App Provides Additional Controls
The app makes maintenance pretty straightforward. It shows the expected remaining lifespan of each part, but as of this writing, replacement parts are not yet sold for the 10.
Routines are easy to create in the app. You can select the default SmartPlan or you can select to vacuum over the entire living room twice a Max strength. I like to run a more intense cleaning over the weekend since it won’t distract me from work. I do find it odd that you can’t schedule the routine while creating it. You have to go into the “Schedules” tab of the device settings, which isn’t intuitive.
If you want to run the Saros 10 while you sleep, you can set a “Do Not Disturb” timeframe. During that time, it will dim lights, lower volume, and disable auto emptying if you choose. You will want to set the cleaning power on this routine to “quiet,” where Roborock claims it is only 52 dB(A).
Voice commands work pretty well as long as you say the exact words of the command. I particularly like the “Hey Rocky, Go clean the bathroom” style commands. I had a bit of trouble with the “clean here” command. It needs to locate you in order to run the command, but it doesn’t put much effort to find you. If you aren’t right near the robot when you say a command with “here” in it, it will just stop the task.
You can link your Roborock account to your existing Google Home or Amazon Alexa accounts. In order to test it, I added my vacuum to my Google Home ecosystem, but I found myself constantly choosing to use the robot’s built-in commands. Roborock offers more commands so there is little need to control it via a smart home voice assistant.
The remote camera is such a nice touch. I use it most to search for my cats when away for a few days. After one of my cats bit the cable to their automatic feeder while we were away, it makes me feel much better that I can check in on things. Before we were limited to two stationary views from our security cameras, but now I can send a robot on a pet-finding expedition.
That said, I am not impressed by the “search for pets” mode. I expected it to go into the middle of each room or open area and spin around. Instead, it spent eleven minutes exploring every nook and cranny of my office while my cat sat out in the open room less than ten feet away. I saw my cat numerous times on the live feed but the Roborock just kept rotating and looking. When it completed the task by finding the pet, it returned to the dock. I can’t seem to find any way to tell the robot that I have two cats and to look for them both.
I much rather just use the remote viewing function. You can create a cruise route by picking a few points you want the robot to hit. It will stop at each point and rotate to take four photos in different directions. You can video call the robot which allows you to both talk out of and hear from the robot.
Should You Buy the Roborock Saros 10?
You should always factor in your specific space when making smart home purchases, but it is especially important when considering a $1,600 vacuum. If you have a large carpeted area, you will love the increased suction power, but you might miss out on a few of the features offered by the AI 3.0 perception system. The amount of pet hair the Roborock pulls out of my carpeting is incredible; I just wish it could reach all the way to the baseboards.
Most spaces can benefit from the slim profile and lifting chassis, allowing the vacuum to access more than other robovacs can offer. Hard floors will look great. Between the corner brushing and intense mopping capabilities, the space is kept clean.
The robot and dock both look elite. Between the anti-tangle brushes and the automatic mop cleaning and removal, there is very little you have to do actively. I can only give the Roborock Saros 10 one rating, and while I would give it a 9 on hard floors and a 7 on carpets, it feels fair to give it an 8.
Roborock Saros 10
The ultra-slim and advanced Saros 10 features the revolutionary RetractSense Navigation System for thorough cleaning under low clearance areas and the certified Dual Anti-Tangle System to tackle pet and long hair. Enjoy uninterrupted cleaning with the industry-first Adapt-Lift Chassis, and keep your floors spotless with the Saros 10’s upgraded VibraRise 4.0 mopping system.
