Roborock's new robot vacuum is so hands-off, you might forget it's there

Robot vacuums are great at saving you from actually vacuuming, but that doesn’t always mean they’re completely hands-off. Hair still gets tangled around the brushes, mop pads need cleaning, and if your home has a mix of hard floors and carpets, there’s always the possibility of a damp mop ending up somewhere it really shouldn’t. Roborock’s new Qrevo 2 Pro wants to make those annoyances much less common, and some of its upgrades sound genuinely useful.

That starts with the actual cleaning. The Qrevo 2 Pro comes with 25,000Pa of suction, so it should have more than enough power to deal with the usual mess around the house. Crumbs scattered under the dining table, dust hiding beneath the sofa, pet hair on the floor, or dirt worked into a carpet are all exactly the sort of things it’s built to pick up.

That’s exactly the kind of maintenance Roborock is trying to cut down on here. The Qrevo 2 Pro uses its Dual Anti-Tangle System, with the main brush and side brush designed to move hair toward the vacuum instead of letting it wrap around the rollers. Roborock claims this setup can achieve a 0% hair-tangling rate and remove 100% of hair, as per its testing. Those claims will obviously need some real-world testing, but having to clean the brushes less often would already make owning a robot vacuum considerably easier.

And that hands-off approach carries over when the Qrevo 2 Pro moves from hard floors to carpets. Some robot vacuums simply lift their mop pads when they roll onto carpet, but the Qrevo 2 Pro goes a step further and removes them completely. Before cleaning a carpeted area, the robot can head back to its dock, leave the mop pads behind, and return to vacuum the carpet without anything wet underneath. Once it needs to start mopping again, it can go back and reattach them. If you have rugs scattered between tiled or wooden floors, that could save you from worrying about damp pads brushing across them or leaving wet patches behind.

Leaving the mops behind solves the wet-carpet problem, but Roborock is also giving the vacuum a little more help once it gets there. Carpet Boost+ increases suction when the Qrevo 2 Pro is on carpet, while the Deep Carpet Cleaning option sends it over the same area for another pass in a crisscross pattern to catch spots it may have missed the first time.

Once it has worked its way across the floors, most of what’s left happens back at the dock. It can wash the mop pads using water heated to 75 degrees Celsius, then dry them with 45-degree warm air, which should help keep them from sitting around wet and developing unpleasant smells. It can also refill the robot’s water tank automatically, while the dustbin can go up to 65 days before Roborock says you’ll need to empty the dock.

Put all of that together, and Roborock is essentially trying to make the Qrevo 2 Pro something you have to babysit as little as possible. The Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro begins its rollout today at a promotional price of $550 in the US, down from its regular $799. There’s plenty packed into it, but the most appealing part may simply be how often you can leave it alone. After all, the whole point of buying a robot to clean your floors is spending less time thinking about cleaning your floors.