5 Unexpected Features You Might Find on Your Robot Vacuum

Robot vacuums are one of the best technologies you can have at home. Companies have invested a ton of money to make these robots worth it, and they’re great for intelligently vacuuming and cleaning the house and even cleaning themselves. The days when these robots ate cables or relied heavily on users to move furniture and free up space are long gone.

They can identify how much they need to clean, where they need to return, and even what is in front of them. However, if you think you’ve seen everything a robot vacuum can do, know that there are a few unexpected features you might find on your next robot, like a flexible arm, legs that can help it climb stairs, an LLM voice assistant, and more.

As manufacturers reach a plateau in how they can improve their robots, some of them have decided to try different approaches that, while it may seem like a crazy idea at first, can eventually expand from truly high-end models to more affordable options. Since every home is different, it makes sense that many different robots are available, as they may be useful to some users and less so to others. That said, here are some of the unexpected features you might find on a robot vacuum.

At CES 2026, Roborock presented a robot vacuum cleaner capable of climbing stairs. With the Saros Rover, it uses hinged, frog-shaped wheel legs that can clear steps as they go up. While the company hasn’t provided a timeline for when this product will actually be released, it told BGR that it’s more than just a concept and is a product it’s working on. If you’ve been following our Roborock coverage, you know that the company has presented innovative concepts in the past and turned them into working products.

That said, if climbing stairs becomes a reality for robot vacuums, it would mean that cleaning homes with different floor levels could be much easier; Better than that, if your house has a large threshold, then these new legs could help the robot cross them without problem. The technology has already come a long way, as Roborock first introduced a robot that can reach thresholds of up to 4cm in height, but companies like MOVA now offer robot vacuum cleaners that can reach 8cm in height.

While not everyone needs a robot vacuum that can exceed thresholds, this technology can be very useful depending on the size of your home, or if you’re simply tired of having to move your robot up and down different floors because of these unevennesses. Although the technology is not yet perfect and robots need a few tries to reach a new area with a threshold, the technology has evolved rapidly and expanded to different models, brands and price ranges.

Released in 2025, Roborock was the first company to introduce a robot vacuum cleaner with an arm. While we wondered in our review whether a robot needs an arm, the multi-axis mechanical arm the company introduced in one of its flagship products is truly impressive. Featuring a high-torque extraction mechanism, it uses AI cameras to isolate small objects like a misplaced sock, toy or cable, then the robot deploys its extension tool to lift the object from the ground and take it to a designated area. What’s more interesting is that you can tell the robot to collect your flip-flops and put them in a specific area, while other debris like paper towels can be put in a trash can.

Over the past year, Roborock has continued to improve this product’s software, with more recognizable objects and even allowing it to pick up other objects from the ground. Thanks to this technology, the robot can guarantee a perfectly clean environment because it eliminates objects that should not have been in front of it, thus hindering the cleaning process.

Instead of simply avoiding an object, cable or sock, the robot intelligently understands what is in front of it and performs an action. Even though most customers don’t need a robot with a flexible arm, it’s cool that robots like this exist.

Samsung, Roborock and Ecovacs are among the companies that have upgraded the standard front-facing obstacle avoidance camera with infrared and HD RGB cameras that can integrate with their mobile apps. With this, if you have a cleaning schedule or just worry about your pet while you are working or away from it, you can turn on the robot and ask it to find the pet. When the robot detects the animal, it can follow it from a safe distance, take automated photos, or send a notification to your phone allowing you to open a live video feed with two-way audio communication.

This means you can talk to your pet, hear it bark, meow or whatever, and make sure everything is okay at home. This very unexpected feature can be very important for pet owners, as they can use their robots’ sophisticated sensors to check how their pets are doing.

It’s a cool feature that’s available in robots like Samsung’s Bespoke Jet Bot AI+ series, Roborock’s premium S series and Saros lines, and Ecovacs’ Deebot X models. Additionally, these cameras can also be useful for identifying objects around the house and then sending you notifications about what was found on the floor and where.

After all, it’s an AI world, and the LLM fever is also heading towards robot vacuum cleaners. Why do you need to have a conversation with them? It’s not clear, but companies like Samsung, Ecovacs, and MOVA have added LLMs to their robot vacuum offerings. All joking aside, what they’re actually offering are local microprocessors programmed to recognize basic speech keywords, as the vacuum’s microphone array routes audio requests through a cloud-based LLM backend.

The biggest advantage is that the machine can understand regular conversations, syntax variations and multi-step commands. On top of that, the robot can do a much better job of explaining issues it may encounter while cleaning the environment rather than just issuing a generic error code.

With this change in new robot vacuums, users no longer need to memorize command phrases such as “Start cleaning kitchen zone two.” Instead, the robot vacuum with an LLM-backed system can understand “I dropped some crumbs near the kitchen, go clean that up,” and it can infer the intent, correlate it to map coordinates, and execute the task. This makes the process of unscheduled cleaning much easier than opening the robot vacuum phone app, selecting the area and the type of cleaning the robot should do there, because it can understand your request and accomplish the task.

Least unexpected, but, to be honest, slipped under my radar, is something that Xiaomi and MOVA have recently introduced, namely retractable LiDAR navigation towers. While, of course, one would expect robot vacuums to clean and clean spaces properly, one thing that bothers me and several other customers is that sometimes these robots are too big and can’t fit under furniture. One of the main problems is that standard LiDAR navigation requires a fixed, raised dome above the chassis to scan the room 360 degrees.

With a retractable LiDAR, these companies can have their robots identify with the front sensor a low-clearance opening, such as the edge of a sofa, bed frame, or kitchen cabinets, so they can align the retractable LiDAR within the robots’ main body and significantly lower their profile.

In the case of Xiaomi’s Robot Vacuum 5, its dToF navigation module makes the robot measure less than 9.5 cm, which is more than enough for most furniture. Although the company claims that mopping capabilities are not available, you can ensure that you are not the one who has to manually clean under these spaces, as the robot can vacuum up there every time you start a cleaning session. This is an unexpected feature that I hope will be added by more manufacturers in the near future.