Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow

The Qrevo Curv 2 Flow is Roborock's first attempt at a roller-style mop, and it's the kind of first attempt that tells you the company has been thinking about this for a while. Instead of dragging spinning pads over your floor, the SpiraFlow system lays down clean water and immediately scrapes the dirty water back into a tank, with eight hydration points keeping the roller itself from turning into a grey sponge. On paper it's the most convincing answer yet to the oldest complaint about robot mops — that they mostly just redistribute grime.

In practice, the hardware backs that up on the surfaces it was built for. Reviewers found it shrugged off genuinely nasty wet messes — spilled jelly, berry compote, leaked olive oil — on hard floors, and the 15 N of downward pressure and extra-wide extending roller mean it isn't tickling the floor the way older pad systems did. LiDAR navigation is the dependable, boring kind: it gets to every room, finds its way home and reads furniture and drop-offs correctly, and one tester watched it climb a 1 cm kitchen threshold that had stopped previous robots cold.

This is a machine for a specific household: predominantly hard floors, ideally a home where pet or human hair is a daily problem, and an owner who wants the dock to handle the grim parts. Hot-water roller washing, heated-air drying and dirty-water detection genuinely reduce hands-on time, and what maintenance remains is well designed — bin, roller and scraper slide out and click back with voice confirmation. If your home is mostly carpet, look elsewhere; Roborock has optimised this one in the other direction.

The standout result is the anti-tangle performance. A perfect 0% score in Vacuum Wars' 7-inch hair test — against a 21% average across everything they've tested — is the sort of number that changes how you feel about owning a robot vacuum, and the DuoDivide brush with its centre channel clearly earns its marketing. Carpet deep-cleaning at 87% is also above average, which slightly undercuts the "not for carpet" framing: it cleans carpet fine, it just isn't the machine you'd buy primarily for it.

The disappointments cluster around the mop's limits and a handful of regressions. Dried-on stains were measured as dramatically below average, which is an awkward result for a robot whose headline feature is mopping — the roller excels at lifting fresh liquid and fails at scrubbing something that has set. Obstacle avoidance is a step back from the earlier CurvX despite 200-object recognition, and the AI still misses smaller items, so you'll keep pre-tidying cables and socks. Dropping the CurvX's extending side brush for fixed auto-lift brushes also costs it corner reach, which feels like the wrong corner to cut on a flagship. Airflow, battery efficiency and the robot's height were all flagged as weak points too.

Value is the last complication. At $999.99 this sits squarely in flagship territory, and pricing has been volatile — listings as low as $715 direct from Roborock and as high as A$2,499 in Australia. At the discounted end it's an easy recommendation for a hard-floor home; at full list, the dried-stain weakness and the small feature regressions make it harder to justify over the model it replaces. Two independent scores — 3.64/5 from Vacuum Wars and 8/10 from WIRED — land in roughly the same place, and so do we: a very good, genuinely innovative robot with enough asterisks that it isn't the automatic choice.

• Buy it if: you have mostly hard floors, deal with a lot of hair, and want a dock that handles cleanup for you.
• Skip it if: your home is heavily carpeted, cluttered with small obstacles, or your mopping problem is dried-on rather than fresh spills.