2 min readSomeone at Roborock HQ looked at robot vacuums and decided they needed hydraulics, and so the Qrevo Curve was born. Using what it has dubbed the Adaptilift Chassis, the new robovac can lift its body high enough to clear four centimetre thresholds. That is about four times as much as the typical robovac can handle.
While this is a small four centimetre step towards tackling the stair problem, in practice it looks a bit more like a giant leap. During the demo, the vacuum looks like it takes a running start to throw itself up the threshold. You can hear it accelerate as the front wheel pushes upward and it pummels towards the lip. It has the same momentum as it comes back down these precipices, with the device almost getting some air time. Yeeting itself up and down stairs aside, the Adaptilift technology has other uses. It can now handle high pile carpets better, and manoeuvre over obstacles that it would usually get stuck on like plates on the ground.
The Qrevo Curve has the same edge mopping technology we have seen from Roborock and is equipped with a different version of the brand’s zero-tangle roller system. While we have seen a dual-roller system in Australia, the DuoDivide main brush is ostensibly one roller with a gap in the middle. This gap allows the hair to not only not tangle, but also get swept up easily into the dustbin. When we tested the S8 MaxV Ultra we found that the device tended to cough up hairballs with the twin roller system, so this could potentially fix that issue.
Adaptilift isn’t the only airbourne feature Roborock introduced. The Qrevo Slim, which is a thinner version of the Qrevo family has ditched lidar for a time of flight sensor instead. By making the switch Roborock was able to remove the pop-up lidar sensor that is ever present on robot vacuums. You may know it better as that thing that stops your robovac from getting under your bed. Removing this not only makes the Slim a tiny 82mm tall, but the time of flight sensor allows for 3D mapping rather than 2D. Roborock also claims that this improves object detection and avoidance threefold, which would be quite the achievement considering how good it already is.
While these innovative robot devices will hit the European market in a matter of days, Australia will unfortunately miss out. However alongside robotics, Roborock also announced the H5 stick vacuum which will come visit us down under. The lightweight stick vac weighs just 1.55kg, and somehow managed to get a 60 minute run time while being that tiny. Generally stick vacuums get about 40 minutes, and tend to run heavier at 2-3kg. It is available with either a dust bag to go in the chamber, or HEPA filtration without the dust bag. Australian pricing is still a question mark on this, but in the EU it will go for €299.99, which could roughly translate to $499 in Australia.
