Photo: Agent Meister - Geek Squad
Agent Derek Meister from the Geek Squad spoke to Bill about The Robot Vacuums of 2025 are evolving. Including Limbs and Legs. There were a slew of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extendable mops, movable towers, and new navigation systems.
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There were a slew of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extendable mops, movable towers, and new navigation systems.
Arms for picking up after you
The main focus of flagship robovacs over the last few years has been obstacle avoidance. Adding AI-powered camera navigation systems has helped robots avoid getting stuck on socks, slippers, and toys, but it means they haven’t actually cleaned all of your floor.
The solution: adding a robotic arm to move the items out of the way. Roborock’s Saros Z70 and Dreame’s concept vacuum both showed off what a robovac can do, given a robotic claw on top.
Both companies say they have software that will allow you to designate where items get placed, letting the vacuum tidy up for you in a whole new way. Roborock said you can designate an area for the bot to put things it cleans up, and Dreame said its concept vac will be able to put specific items in specific places, such as cat toys by the cat bed or shoes by the front door. Neither demoed their app, however, so I didn’t get to see how this works.
The biggest limitation for these arms is weight: Roborock’s can only pick up light items up to 300 grams — it’s currently programmed for socks, tissues, small washcloths, and sandals. Dreame says its will be capable of up to 500 grams, which means it can tackle shoes ( a sneaker up a men’s size 42/9). But only Roborock actually demoed its robot picking anything up — and that was just a sock.
Climbing to new heights
Robovac makers are adding appendages on the other side of their bots as well. Both Dreame’s concept vacuum and its new Ultra X50 have two little legs — small appendages that extend from under their body to lift them up.
They’re not articulating legs; they’re just small levers that help propel the bot up onto a step, and then its forward momentum knocks them down as it passes the step. The benefit here is navigating high room transitions, not really stairs. So, if you have a small step between your living room and kitchen or a high transition between the tile floor in your bathroom and the carpet in your bedroom, these robots should be able to move between the two.
Less LIDAR
The other big robot navigation trend this year is retractable lidar towers. Lidar has long been the preferred navigation tech for most robot vacs, but that pesky tower on top can prevent them from getting under low furniture.
Lidar is also being augmented by more sensors and AI to help robot vacuums better understand your home. The idea here is a bot that can seamlessly navigate around your home and know about the unruly rug tassels in the living room, rather than you creating keep-out zones in the app to make sure it doesn’t get derailed.