Roborock Saros 20 Review

The Saros 20 is Roborock doing what Roborock does best: taking last year's flagship and cranking every dial another notch. The headline is 36,000Pa of suction — roughly double what the Qrevo Curv 2 Flow managed — but the more interesting engineering is underneath. Ditching the raised LiDAR turret for the StarSight 2.0 sensor array (3D time-of-flight IR front and rear, plus an RGB camera) drops the body to around 80mm, which is the difference between cleaning under your sofa and permanently ignoring it.

The AdaptiLift Chassis 3.0 is the other genuinely novel part. Lifting wheels, independent side and front elevation to rescue itself when beached, a 360-degree geared arm to haul the robot over 4.5cm obstacles, and claimed double-layer threshold climbing up to 8.8cm — this is a robot designed for homes with awkward transitions and thick rugs, the exact scenario that defeats most machines. Add a dock that washes the mops at 100°C and native Matter support for HomeKit and SmartThings without the usual bridge nonsense, and the feature list is about as complete as the category gets.

Who's it for? People with multi-level flooring, low furniture, thresholds, and £1,129 they're comfortable spending on not thinking about the floors again. Everyone else should look further down Roborock's range.

On the evidence available, this is a very strong machine let down mainly by its price and a handful of rough edges rather than by any real functional shortcoming. The suction figure is marketing-flavoured — Pascal ratings always are — but the direction of travel is right, and the independent verdicts we have back up the practical performance, with Expert Reviews recommending it on the strength of its suction, obstacle scaling and object avoidance.

The compromises are real but modest. It's noisier than its predecessor during self-emptying and water pumping, which matters more than spec sheets suggest when the dock lives in a hallway. It still occasionally tries to eat drawstrings and cables, so excellent avoidance is not perfect avoidance. And the return to dual spinning pads after the Qrevo Curv 2 Flow's continuous roller mop is a step sideways at best — spinning pads clean well but reuse the same cloth across the whole floor between dock visits. The dock's 4-litre clean and 3.5-litre waste tanks are sensible, and its relatively compact 381 x 475 x 488mm footprint is a genuine courtesy in a category where docks have grown into furniture.

• One note of caution: a Saros 20 Sonic variant with the VibraRise Sonic vibrating mop plate has been referenced with no release date. If vibration mopping matters to you, that's an unresolved question hanging over this purchase.

Rating: 4.5/5. Close to the state of the art, and the climbing and clearance work address problems most rivals still pretend don't exist. It loses half a point for the noise, the occasional cable-eating and a price that demands near-perfection.