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Roborock Saros 10: two-minute review
Launched in January 2025, the Roborock Saros 10 is a premium robot vacuum with some seriously cutting-edge features. Primary among these is a navigation puck that retracts down into the bot when it senses it’s entering a low-height space. That, combined with a suspension system that can bounce it over tall thresholds, means this bot can reach places other robovacs can’t.
On test, I found that both these features worked reliably well. And while the pop-down puck will only really come into play in homes with furniture that’s a quite-specific distance off the floor, if you do fall into this category then this robotic will prove a game-changer. No more shifting the sofa once every six months to find a horrifying amount of dust sitting below it!
I was also impressed with the Saros 10’s cleaning powers. Suction is strong enough to pull large volumes of dog hair off carpeted floors without fuss, and the anti-tangle roller does exactly what it’s designed to do. Mopping is good, too, with the lowest mopping modes creating only the lightest mop; perfect for floors that are sensitive to too much moisture. On balance, I still think spinning mop pads (such as those that feature on the Saron 10’s sister model, the Roborock Saros 10R) do a better job of scrubbing, but I did like how the additional mini side mop on the Saros 10 got right up to the edges of rooms.
I should also give special mention to the impressive hands-off dock, which not only empties dust and charges the bot (in double-quick time), but also dispenses detergent, washes the mop pads with hot water, and dries them with warm air. All this while looking far more stylish than basically any other dock I’ve seen in all my time reviewing robovacs.
At list price, the Saros 10 is far from cheap, but it’s roughly in line with other brands’ top-of-the-range models offering similarly advanced features. If you just want decent cleaning and are happy to take care of some of the maintenance tasks yourself, there are cheaper options to be found. However, if you’re after an advanced model that makes use of the very latest tech and requires minimal intervention from you, this might be the best robot vacuum for you. Read on for my full Roborock Saros 10 review.
Roborock Saros 10 review: price & availability
- List price: $1,599.99 / £1,499.99 / AU$2,999
- Launched: January 2025
- Available: Worldwide
The Roborock Saros 10 was one of three new Roborock robot vacuums announced at CES in January 2025, alongside sister model Saros 10R and the Saros Z70, which has a mechanical arm.
At list price direct from Roborock, the Saros 10 costs $1,599.99 in the US, £1,499.99 in the UK, and AU$2,999 in Australia. At time of writing, it isn’t available via any third-party retailers, but it may come to Amazon at some point.
That price puts it firmly into the premium bracket for robovacs. In fact, it’s one of the most expensive models we’ve tested so far, although its price is roughly in line with many other brands’ top-of-the-range models. Build quality, performance and featureset help justify that price somewhat, and I’m not going to score it down too much on price because I’m glad this kind of innovation exists in the robovac world – plus, it’s a truly excellent robot vacuum. Having said that, I’d still hold out for a discount (or for the price to come down over time) before buying one.
This is a super-advanced robot vacuum, and you don’t need to spend this much to get an appliance that will keep your floors clean. For most people’s needs, there are models at even half the price that will do the job – especially if you’re willing to sacrifice the mop washing / drying / self-cleaning dock functions, all of which will bump up the price significantly.
Note, however, that there are a couple of ongoing costs to factor in, too. The first is replacement dust bags, although with a 2.5-liter capacity, each bag should last a decent amount of time. The second is floor cleaner: Roborock recommends you use only its own branded detergent, and I’m disappointed to report it’s very expensive.
- Value for money score: 4 out of 5
Roborock Saros 10 specs
|
Max suction: |
22,000 Pa |
|
Robot diameter: |
13.7in / 34.9cm |
|
Robot height: |
3.1in / 8cm |
|
Dock dimensions (W x D x H): |
16 x 17.3 x 18.7in / 41 x 43.9 x 47.4cm |
|
Dust bin volume (onboard): |
270ml |
|
Dust bin volume (dock): |
2.5L |
|
Dock water tank volume (clean): |
4L |
|
Dock water tank volume (dirty): |
3.5L |
|
Base type: |
Charge, self-empty, refill water, wash mop pads, clean and dry mop pads, dispense detergent, self-clean. |
|
Max threshold clearance: |
1.6in / 4cm |
Roborock Saros 10 review: design
- Pop-up navigation puck and bouncy chassis for traversing thresholds
- Bulky but smart mirrored self-empty dock, with mop cleaning
- Side mop and brush, and split main roller for directing hair
The bot itself looks similar to your standard disc-shaped robovac, but the main difference here is that rather than having a fixed navigation puck, it has one that can pop up and down. It will generally be up (this allows for better navigation); however, it will retract when the bot is docked and if it senses it’s entering a low-height space.
On the front there’s also a camera and additional navigation elements. The camera can also be used as a security cam, or to check in on your pets while you’re out.
Flip it over and you’ll find two chunky wheels and a smaller front wheel, all of which can raise and lower independently to get the bot over tall thresholds. It’s designed to be able to traverse thresholds up to a total of 1.6 inches / 4cm in height, including double-step thresholds, using the same AdaptiLift technology included with the Roborock Qrevo Curv. The bot learns the best process for each threshold in the mapped area.
The roller is rather unusual. It combines rubber fins and bristles, and is split in the middle to allow hair to escape into the bin, rather than becoming tangled and requiring you to then manually cut it off.
There’s a spinning side brush that tucks itself away when it isn’t in use. Again, the design is a little unusual: it has two arms, which sit near each other and extend at a slanting angle, to resist hair from becoming tangled.
For mopping, the Saros 10 has a fixed, D-shaped mop pad. This has two vibrating zones that are designed to help dislodge dirt, and can also press down on the floor. (It’s still not my preferred style – I find dual-spinning discs do a more thorough scrubbing job, which is the reason for docking a half-mark in this section).
There’s also a tiny extra side mop designed to get closer to the edges of rooms. Cleverly, if you opt for a mode where the mop isn’t needed, it can drop the mop off in the dock, so there’s no danger of damp carpets.
The panel on the top of the robovac is magnetic, and can be removed to reveal the onboard dustbin. You shouldn’t need to access this often – only if the self-empty process fails because something has jammed the mechanism. Presumably there’s also a water tank in there, but I couldn’t find it.
Dock design
The Saros 10 dock is one of those does-it-all units that not only charges the bot and empties its small onboard dustbin, but does a whole load more besides. It can refill its onboard water tank, disperse detergent, clean the bot’s mop pads (at up to 176ºF / 80ºC), dry them (at 140ºF) over the course of a few hours, and also clean itself (at up to 176ºF).
It’s designed to be able to recognize what’s on the mop and adjust the temperature to suit; so it knows to use hotter water for grease and coffee stains than items such as mashed potato.
Image 1 of 3
As such, the Saros 10 is fairly bulky. However, it’s one of the best-looking docks I’ve seen, with a smart, mirrored front that simply reflects the rest of your room back at you. So if it looks messy, that’s on you.
The dustbag is hidden behind a front flap that opens when you press it, and two large water tanks (one for clean, one for dirty from cleaning the mop) are housed in the top, again behind a door.
There’s a removable ramp up into the dock, and inside you can see the brushes for cleaning the mop pad.
- Design score: 4.5 out of 5
Roborock Saros 10 review: performance
- Excellent vacuuming on higher settings; can handle pet hair
- Mopping also very good on higher settings – edge mop is useful
- Navigation great but object avoidance unreliable
Setup was painless. I unpackaged the bot, left it to charge on its dock, and then was prompted to complete a quick mapping run. Here, the bot made its way briefly into each room, looked around a bit, then left. It then provided me with a suggestion of what it thought the rooms were, and their floor types.
I was testing this bot in a town house with multiple levels, so I repeated the process for each floor, carrying the bot up to each level to do so (advanced though this robovac is, it still can’t climb stairs).
The initial plans were generally very accurate. After they’d been created, I went back in and corrected room types, removed unnecessary areas (it included the stairs when mapping higher levels, although its cliff sensors reliably prevented it from trying to go down them), and added no-go areas.
Vacuuming
On the vacuuming front, there are five power levels to choose from: Quiet, Balanced, Turbo, Max and Max+ (there’s a battery life warning with this mode). You can also opt to clean the space once or twice. I did find this bot a little noisy in vacuum-only mode, but it certainly wasn’t any louder than a manual vacuum.
To try out vacuuming, I first set off the Saros 10 to clean each floor of the house, using a mix of different power levels, in vacuum-only mode. After cleaning, and before the bot returned to the dock, I inspected the onboard bin to see what it had gathered collected.
I found Turbo mode was enough to extract plenty of dog hair from carpeted floors, and even more if I amped it up to a higher power mode. I was also impressed that the bot had no trouble auto-emptying, even when full with hair. I could hear the tell-tale “whoomph” sound as the wodge of dog hair made its way from the onboard bin to the dock dustbag.
I was also generally impressed by the roller design – there was next-to-none of my long hair wrapped around it at the end of a vacuuming session. That isn’t the case with some of the robovacs I test.
Image 1 of 4
To test how the Roborock Saros 10 handles different kinds of debris, I ran TechRadar‘s standard suction tests. I sprinkled a teabag of dry tea on the carpet, alongside a handful of oats. I then ran the vacuum over them. On first pass in Turbo mode, the results were a little disappointing – the bot failed to pick much up, and what it did, it spat back out on a different area of carpet.
I ran another spot clean in Max+ mode and was far more impressed. This time, the bot picked up most of the debris, both large and small. To be clear, this is a tricky test. I went back over the tea spillage area with my Dyson Gen5detect vacuum and even that struggled to get the very last specs of tea from the carpet.
It’s worth pointing out here that, in general, robot vacuums are designed for maintenance cleans – for deep cleaning, you’ll still want to keep one of the best manual vacuums to hand. Among robot vacuums I’ve tested, the Saros 10’s suction performance in general was very good.
Image 1 of 2
I ran the same test with tea and oats on a hard, tiled floor. This time, the bot picked up almost everything first time in Turbo mode, albeit with a fair bit of flicking around of debris. The only remaining bits were in the grouting cracks, and I managed to get those by remote-controlling the bot over the relevant area afterwards.
Image 1 of 2
To assess this bot’s edge-cleaning powers, I sprinkled team and oats along the edge of the tiled kitchen. It did a pretty good job of clearing it, although it did ping everything around a bit, and there were a few remnants left that it was quicker to tackle with a manual vacuum that try and get the bot to handle.
Mopping
There are four mopping levels to choose from – Mild, Standard, Intense and Extreme. These increase not just the amount of water used, but also the enthusiasm of the scrubbing. Standard mode is really very light; I found the floor had almost completely dried by the time the bot had finished cleaning the room.
That’s great news if you have floors that are sensitive to too much moisture – wooden floors, for example. However, if that’s not the case and you want a more thorough mop, you’ll want to deploy one of the higher mopping modes.
You can choose for the bot to mop only, vacuum first and then mop, or do both at once. I tend to avoid combination mopping and vacuuming since it will often lead to messy rollers and side brushes, due to the combination of water and dry debris. In mop-only mode, the Saros 10 really is extremely quiet.
On test, I found it could take a while for the mop pads to fully saturate, and especially in Standard or Mild modes. Initially, I could see damp streaks on the floor where the bot had cleaned incompletely. However, the tiny extra side mop does a good job of getting right up to the edges of rooms.
Image 1 of 2
For my mopping test, I smeared a tiny bit of ketchup on a tiled floor and left it to dry. After one pass in Standard mode, the Saros 10 had hardly cleaned up any of it. Amping it up to higher mop levels yielded better results.
On balance, while this bot does a good job of mopping, I still prefer the spinning dual disc-shaped mop style when it comes to pure scrubbing power.
Navigation and obstacle avoidance
The pop-up puck is an interesting one, because in reality it’s a very specific situation in which it’s actually useful – you need furniture that’s taller than 3.3inches / 8.2cm but shorter than 4.5inches / 11.4cm (the height where the puck wouldn’t need to retract) off the ground. If you have that, though, it’s super useful.
There’s only one piece of furniture in my testing house that falls into the correct bracket, and the puck worked exactly as stated here. It also didn’t impede navigation at all, although said piece of furniture is quite small, so it probably didn’t present the biggest challenge.
I also ran TechRadar‘s standard obstacle avoidance tests, placing a sock, a charge cable, and a shoe on the floor, spread apart. I also added a box of tissues, for good measure. Results were mixed here.
The bot tried to eat the sock. It successfully identified and avoided the shoe, and at first also the tissue box, although it then went back and pushed it around a bit.
Image 1 of 2
The Saros 10 also chewed the cable. That isn’t a massive surprise, because I’ve yet to come across a robot vacuum that can successfully spot cables. However, it’s something Roborock specifically states the Saros 10 can do, so it’s disappointing in this regard.
In general use, however, I found this robovac pretty good at obstacle avoidance. There are various bins, speaker bases and ornaments on the floor that it successfully avoided – but as mentioned, it isn’t quite the “exceptional” obstacle recognition and avoidance promised by Roborock.
Advanced features include the ability to use the robot to hunt out, photograph, and even video-call your pet. I did not try these features, because I suspect the dog would find such an intrusion wildly unsettling rather than reassuring.
Any photography and video features are turned off by default. To enable, you have to manually press some buttons on the robot vacuum, and you also have to be the primary account holder.
Battery life
I can’t fault the Saros 10’s battery. While it’s less of an issue with robot vacuums than a cordless stick vacuum – because the bot will automatically return to the dock to charge whenever it runs out of juice, before resuming its cleaning task – it’s still helpful for a robot to offer decent runtimes. That’s especially true if you’re going to use it in a house with multiple floors, where it can’t always get back to its charge dock without help.
The Saros 10 managed an impressive amount of cleaning on a single charge. I was concerned that the Max+ mode – which comes with a “battery draining mode” warning – would run the battery down super quickly, but on test it trundled through three complete room cleans in vacuum-only Max+ mode (from a not-full battery in the first place) before running out of juice. Impressive.
Roborock also promises fast charging; it claims the dock will take the robovac from flat battery to full in 150 minutes. On test, I found this accurate. I went from 14% battery (at which point the bot told me it needed to return to dock to recharge) to 100% in under two and a half hours. If it goes flat mid-task, the bot will also figure out how much more power it needs to complete the task, and only charge to that point, for maximum efficiency.
Dock performance
Based on a couple of weeks of testing, the dock seems to be performing as stated. I’ve experienced no issues with the bin failing to empty completely, and the washing function seems to be working as claimed based on how clean the mop pads look and how dirty the water in the waste water tank is.
I’ll update this section when I’ve been using the bot a little longer, and have a more complete view of the dock performance over time.
- Performance score: 4 out of 5
Roborock Saros 10 review: app
- Lots of settings for precise control
- … but will also figure things out automatically, if you prefer
- Generally very usable, with a few usability quirks
The Roborock app is well designed and nice and usable, although it can take a little time to learn your options and explore all the settings at first – in part because there are so many of them. There are also a few areas I found unhelpful. For example, to swap between different floorplans in a multi-storey home, you need to go via the “edit map” menu, which feels unintuitive.
Otherwise, mapping is straightforward, and you have the option to set no-go zones and invisible walls, as well as removing sections that are added in error. You can also add furniture, and create cleaning preferences for different rooms and floors.
Strangely, you can’t manually select the floor type for each room. You can create “carpet areas”, but this is fiddly – no areas can overlap, making things tricky if the plan includes carpet rooms and hard floor rooms. The app will automatically identify floor type, but the areas that have been designated as carpet isn’t always clear. I’d prefer to be able to set this as a backup – no one wants a mopped carpet.
A relatively new addition to the setup is SmartPlan 2.0, which uses AI to customize the cleaning route, suction power and mop settings based on the bot’s knowledge of its environment and previous use. Roborock says it can even reduce suction power during designated “quiet hours”.
In short, you can have as much or as little control as you want here. If you don’t want to get involved, you can basically leave the bot to figure out everything on its own, and it will do a very good job. Alternatively, you can really dig into the different features and set up everything exactly as you want it.
Should you buy the Roborock Saros 10?
|
Attribute |
Notes |
Rating |
|---|---|---|
|
Value |
Very much in the premium bracket, although in line with other brand’s range-toppers, and extensive featureset helps justify the price. |
4 / 5 |
|
Design |
Retractible navigation puck, anti-tangle rollers and D-shaped mop pad with extra mini side mop. Smart, mirrored dock that takes care of almost all maintenance for you. |
4.5 / 5 |
|
Performance |
Strong vacuuming and mopping, especially on higher settings. Reliable navigation but slightly underwhelming object avoidance. |
4 / 5 |
|
App |
Generally well designed and usable, but can be slightly fiddly due to sheer number of options included. |
4.5 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
Roborock Saros 10: alternatives to consider
| Header Cell – Column 0 |
Roborock Saros 10 (reviewed) |
Roborock Saros 10R |
Eufy X10 Pro Omni |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Max suction: |
22,000Pa |
20,000Pa |
8,000Pa |
|
Robot size (W x D): |
13.7 x 13.7 inches / 34.9 x 34.9cm |
13.7 x 13.7 inches / 34.9 x 34.9cm |
12.9 x 13.9 inches / 32.7 x 35.3cm |
|
Robot height: |
3.1 inches / 8cm |
3.1 inches / 8cm |
4.5 inches / 11.4cm |
|
Dock dimensions (W x D x H): |
16 x 17.3 x 18.7 inches / 41 x 43.9 x 47.4cm |
15 x 19.2 x 18.7 inches / 38.1 x 48.8 x 47.5cm |
18.1 x 18.9 x 14.4 inches / 48 x 46 x 36.6cm |
|
Dust bin volume (onboard): |
270ml |
270ml |
330ml |
|
Dust bin volume (dock): |
2.5L |
2L |
2.5L |
|
Dock water tank volume (clean / dirty): |
4L / 3.5L |
3L / 3L |
Unknown |
|
Base type: |
Charge, empty dust, refill water, hot wash and dry mop pads, dispense detergent, self-clean |
Charge, empty dust, refill water, hot wash and dry mop pads, dispense detergent, self-clean |
Charge, empty dust, refill water, wash mop pads, clean and dry mop pads |
|
Max threshold clearance: |
1.6 inches / 4cm |
1.6 inches / 4cm |
0.8 inches / 2.1cm |
|
List price: |
$1,599.99 / £1,499.99 / AU$2,999 |
$1,599.99 |
$799.99 / £799 / AU$1,699.95 |
How I tested the Roborock Saros 10
I used the Roborock Saros 10 regularly for two weeks in a four-storey town house that has a mixture of carpeted and tiled floors, and houses a very hairy cocker spaniel. I used it to map and clean each of the levels, exploring the different settings and modes. For a more objective performance review, I ran TechRadar‘s standard suction tests (using dry tea and oats on hard and carpeted floors), mopping tests (using ketchup and juice on a hard floor), and obstacle avoidance tests (using socks, a cable and a shoe). I compared my experience of the Saros 10 against other robot vacuums I’ve tested, in terms of both ease of use and cleaning performance.
Read more about how we test robot vacuum cleaners.
- First reviewed March 2025
