Roborock CES teaser features a robot vacuum’s greatest enemy: stairs

We’re just about one week away from CES 2026 getting started, and tech companies have already been lining up to tease their new hardware announcements ahead of time. Last year, at CES 2025, we saw Roborock push the limits on what we’ve come to expect from robot vacuum hardware with the reveal of the Saros Z70 and its articulated arm for picking up small items. Today we’re getting a preview of how Roborock is planning to follow that one up, and it sure looks like the next frontier for the company’s vacuums could be navigating stairs.

Across its social channels, Roborock teases “a new chapter” for its hardware with this short video:

Alright, so we’ve got what starts off as a very wheel-looking soccer ball, which then stretches out before rolling down some stairs. And then we’re left with a barely lit glimpse at what’s presumably this new hardware.

Stairs have always been a problem for vacuums (even well before the robot era), but recently we’ve been seeing companies step up to finally bound over that hurdle, thanks to efforts like eufy and its MarsWalker platform. While that one exists as an external solution that the vacuum essentially “rides,” we get the sense from this teaser that Roborock might be planning something a little more integrated.

Dialing the brightness way up, we still don’t get a lot of new detail, but the more pronounced edges here do appear to show off some kind of elaborate arm-and-wheel locomotion system. We also see that “VertiBeam” label for Roborock’s object-avoidance system, and while it might be less than a slam dunk, that sure feels like evidence that we’re looking at the vacuum itself here, rather than a MarsWalker-like dedicated stair-climbing platform.

Of course, we’re speculating pretty heavily there — but that’s half the fun of a teaser, isn’t it? Whatever Roborock does have to show off at CES, we’ll be there ready to bring you first-hand confirmation.