The Roborock Saros 10R robot vacuum and mop represent the best robot vacuum and mops nearing the top of their game. The 10R is ultra-slim so it fits under most furniture with expert navigation and obstacle avoidance tech and features a true anti-tangle dual-brush system. It’s a really impressive robot — even if it seems a little boring next to the company’s flagship Saros Z70 with an object-grabbing articulating arm.
I used the Saros 10R around my house over the course of several months and have been completely satisfied with its cleaning performance. Maybe more importantly, my wife was content with it as well. I’ve tested more than a dozen different robot vacuums and mops over the last couple of years and not all of them have withstood her scrutiny. This one has.
A big part of the 10R’s effectiveness comes from its extending side brush and rotating mop pad, both of which reach farther than most competitors to clean along baseboards and around chair legs. As a premium $1,599 unit, it won’t fit every budget, but if you’re looking for a robot that handles most of the work on its own, the 10R deserves serious consideration.
Roborock Saros 10R
The Roborock Saros 10R is a work horse that offers a true hands-off, automated cleaning experience. It’s Roborock’s thinnest design yet to easily slide under furniture and has excellent obstacle avoidance tech.
Setup and design
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Robot vacuums get easier to set up every year, and the Saros 10R is no exception. The packaging is minimal, most components come preassembled, and it’s ready to run within minutes.
Roborock’s Multifunctional Dock 4.0 — the 10R’s self-emptying, self-washing charging station — manages to look both understated and bold. Its all-black, mirror-like finish can disappear in the right corner, almost like an invisibility cloak. But placed in a sun-filled room, against a stark white background, it has the potential to take center stage. The only drawback is that the glossy surface os a fingerprint magnets, which is hard to avoid since you’ll need to access the water tanks every week or so, depending on how often you mop.
The water reservoirs sit on top of the station and are easy to lift out, though their cube-like shape can feel slightly awkward when emptying or refilling. The trade-off is worthwhile: the wide openings make the tanks much easier to clean than the narrow designs on many competitors.
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Functionally, the dock is one of the most advanced available. It washes the mop pads using 176-degree water and then dries them with heated air to prevent mildew. It can also automatically remove the mop pads when you switch to vacuum-only mode, preventing them from dragging across carpets. Add in the fast-charge capability — which powers the robot back up in about 2.5 hours — and the dock stands out as a thoughtfully designed, highly automated base system.
Our review of the Roborock Saros 10 robot vacuum
In use
Roborock; Tyler Hayes/Business Insider
Despite its long list of advanced features, the Roborock Saros 10R is surprisingly easy to operate. It connects over WiFi and is primarily controlled through the Roborock app for iOS and Android, where you can adjust cleaning modes, set schedules, review obstacles, and fine-tune dock settings.
Mapping is at the heart of the experience. The 10R uses Roborock’s latest StarSight Autonomous System — a combination of LiDAR and 3D Time of Flight sensors — to generate a highly detailed floor plan. Even with its slim profile, it identifies walls, furniture, and small objects quickly, and in my home it reliably avoided shoes, toys, and my kids’ craft projects. It also navigated under low furniture like my couch and climbed over 1.5-inch thresholds without issue.
Once your map is created, the app offers all the expected tools: room-specific cleaning, no-go zones, multi-floor mapping, and furniture editing. I blocked off a few tricky areas in my house and found the process straightforward. While advanced controls are available, casual users can simply hit “start” and let the robot handle the details.
Cleaning Performance
I put the Roborock Saros 10R through various tests to get a sense of how well it performed. But I also just let it work normally a lot of the time to get a sense of its real-world performance. On the whole, it did a consistent job of picking up daily crumbs and leaving my hardwood floors free of any grime or residue — an impressive feat in a home with two kids. The Saros 10R reached under our kitchen table and around pantry cabinets effectively, and I never stepped on day-old chips in the morning.
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My dedicated tests on hardwood floors bore out what I was casually observing too. The Saros 10R does well on a smooth, hard surface. I taped off several squares and put coffee, flour, and crushed-up cereal in each to see how it handled different items likely to make it to people’s floors. In each case, the robot picked up all of the mess.
After the vacuum (no mopping) ran over the test area, a few bits of visible coffee grounds and flour dust remained, but it picked up nearly all of the manufactured spills.
However, running the test on a low-pile carpet rug with two passes was a little less encouraging. Using the same foods and methods, the Saros 10R only picked up around 65% of the flour and 70% of the coffee grounds. Both were visible on the carpet afterward, unlike on the hardwood floor. The bright spot in the testing on carpet was the crushed-up Cheerios. The vacuum got nearly all of those crumbs, from cereal dust to full, intact, pieces.
The worst test result came when looking at how it handled corners. Despite an extending brush designed for better edge cleaning, the Saros 10R still had trouble cleaning out corners. When I dumped a teaspoon of flour in a corner and ran it on the highest suction level for two passes it was only able to get around 50 % of the flour.
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My Samsung Bespoke Jet stick vac had no problem cleaning up the flour left in the corner or on the carpet. Stick and upright vacuums outclass robots handily there. But compared to other robot vacuums, the Saros 10R still performed near the top, often outperforming other units I’ve tested over the last 24 months.
One area the Saros 10R did a stellar job was with hair. After several weeks of running daily, I never found any hair knotted or tangled around the main roller brush. The dual anti-tangle system is made up of a DuoDivide Main Brush and a liftable FlexiArm Riser Side Brush. Instead of one long brush underneath the unit, there are two smaller ones. They spin at different rates and the hair gets pulled to the center. It seems to work because even though nearly all vacuums claim some type of “anti-tangle” hair collection, at least a few strains can often be found wrapped around the edges or pushed inside. I didn’t see any of that here, even when removing the brushes.
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The two side effects of using the most powerful suction setting are an increase in noise and a decrease in battery life. On the Max+ power mode, I recorded a noise level of 67 dB from about five feet away, which is at the upper end of normal conversation. Recording the noise level from the next room dropped it to around 56 dB.
You can have the 10R vacuum and mop simultaneously, which is probably the most common mode, but you can also have it vacuum and then back after to mop, or just mop. I tried each setting, but for time’s sake, I always reverted to doing both at once. It was able to recognize rugs well enough and never wet something it shouldn’t have.
The robot did a fine job mopping up a bit of spilled soda and other liquids I artificially placed on the floor. When I wasn’t trying to actively test it I did notice it left behind a wetter trail than I would have preferred. You can adjust the water-level used in the app. Ultimately, I haven’t seen any harm on my real hardwood floors from the mopping water. I’ve been keeping an eye on that aspect too.
Overall, this robot continues to clean well after several months, and it has reliable performance that I’ve been able to count on without too much oversight.
Battery life
On the battery front, Roborock advertises 180 minutes of runtime. But when I ran the vacuum in Max+ mode that number dropped to around 120 minutes. That’s a third of the robot’s total power. Still, in practice, running for two hours on the highest setting was more than enough time to vacuum my entire downstairs area of the living room, kitchen, and family room. The extra time loss is a little hard to complain about. Plus, Roborock warns that the battery life will decrease when using the highest setting.
Dustbin and Maintenance
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The onboard dustbin capacity matters less now that self-emptying docks are standard. Roborock doesn’t list the exact volume, but the robot never paused mid-clean due to a full bin, and it doesn’t empty automatically when washing mop pads.
How much dirt will the dust bag in the dock hold? Roborock doesn’t really say and only recommends changing it as needed, which is unclear to me. After a month of running the Saros 10R five days a week, mine didn’t feel full. I can imagine needing to replace after two to three months of regular use. Your mileage will vary if you have furry friends. For other maintenance, I would recommend wiping out the water buckets and base station every six months to keep noticeable grime away.
Other noteworthy features
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For tech enthusiasts, the Saros 10R includes a handful of extra capabilities worth noting. Roborock’s built-in voice assistant, Rocky, lets you send the robot to specific areas — useful if certain spots, like a litter box zone, get messy frequently. In my home, however, Rocky was too easily triggered and quickly became disruptive. It’s loud by default, and even after lowering the volume, I ultimately turned the feature off.
The 10R supports Matter, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa, and Roborock plans to enable Apple Home integration via an upcoming software update. Once available, you’ll be able to trigger basic cleaning commands through Siri without opening the app.
The color camera can also be used to monitor your home. I’ve used this feature in the past to check on my home when it was being fumigated, and poisonous gas wouldn’t allow people inside. You can’t use the camera to patrol while a cleaning job is in progress, but you can make a video call to the robot or set it up to cruise around on a schedule.
These are niche features I had no specific use for this time around, but they do work fine. Just be aware that you will need to set this up before leaving by pressing the home button on the robot to show you have physical access to it. The Saros 10R also announces that remote viewing is active every few seconds, making it difficult to use for spying purposes. It is more likely that people use this as a pet cam.
Cons to consider
Is it actually a bad thing for a vacuum to clean too much? I found the Saros 10R to be on the aggressive side in this area. It got itself into a little trouble immediately after its initial mapping. I had to go into the app and edit it to add a couple of “no-go” zones around unconventional furniture. I have a thin metal end table that no robots can seem to figure out, and most end up trapped on the leg frame.
Once I tweaked and refined its map, I heard fewer bumps and thumps coming from downstairs during its scheduled cleaning time. Unless you have a very traditional floor plan and furniture, you’ll likely need to spend a few minutes editing its map.
Similarly — in that I’m not sure how much of a negative this is — I found the 10R to take more time to clean than some competing robots. My perception is that this stems directly from how often it wants to wash its mop pads during the cleaning process. The mop pad washing frequency selection is limited to “By room” or every 10 and 25 minutes.
Using the mop to clean daily, I didn’t see any noticeable downside to bumping the time to 25 minutes. Unless the floor is filthy, washing the mop pads every 10 minutes seems overly aggressive to me.
What are your alternatives?
James Brains/Business Insider; Dreamehome app
If you’re intrigued by a high-end robot that can vacuum and mop there are plenty of choices. In fact, most of the leading brands start with expensive options and try to bring features down to more affordable products over time.
Among Roborock offerings, the Saros 10, which was released alongside the 10R, include many of the same features, aesthetics, and price point — it’s a bit confusing. But the 10 might be more suitable if you’re more interested in mopping since the 10 has a high-speed sonic mopping feature as opposed to spinning mops. It also has a slightly higher suction rating and a retractable LIDAR turret to make it even easier to get under low clearances, but the Saros 10R still managed with its own devices.
If you want to stick with Roborock but can’t afford the higher-end models, I’d recommend checking out the Qrevo 35A. It features the full suite of vacuuming and mopping with a self-cleaning dock. You’ll miss out on a lot of the refined dirt-busting and mapping improvements from the last several years, but you should still get a fine automated cleaning experience. Read another reporter’s experience with the original Q Revo.
The Dreame L40 Ultra is another powerful pick that matches the features of the Saros 10R, and aced our pick up tests on both hard floors and carpets. One of its big drawbacks is its large size — both the robot and the docking station. Its LiDAR sensor on the top pokes up higher than the low-profile 10R. It’s a slightly older model that can frequently be found heavily discounted.
I also enjoyed the technology from Narwal on its new Narwal Flow that features a roller mopping brush, instead of two pads. Overall, the Flow offers comprehensive cleaning along with continuous fresh water while mopping. In casual use around my house for a couple of months, it kept hardwood floors tidy.
If saving money is your biggest concern, then the Shark PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro could be a solution, and it’s a well-rounded option for most people, earning our pick as the best robot vacuum and mop combo. The robot vacuum and mop performed much better than expected in our testing. It’s not as smooth as the 10R and doesn’t have as many features, but it can mop with the best of them.
The bottom line
The Roborock Saros 10R excels at cleaning with minimal assistance. Thanks to its charging dock which features water reservoirs and mop washing and drying, it can roam for days or weeks on its own.
On the daily schedule I set it on, the robot picked up most of the crumbs and dirt on my hardwood floors without fail. When tested on the carpet, it struggled a bit to clean big messes, but it still handled them as well as other premium robot vacuums. Even after long-term testing, these sentiments hold true.
The Saros 10R truly is the total package. Its navigation, app design, extending mop, tangle-free brushes, and feature-rich dock all make it stand out as a top cleaning assistant.
