Put socks into the laundry basket, throw paper balls into the trash can, take slippers to the designated area… Under the strong leadership of embodied intelligence, sweepers are relying on robotic arms to advance from two-dimensional floor cleaning to three-dimensional space organization, evolving towards home service robots.
On February 25, Roborock Technology released a number of innovative cleaning products, including the G30 Space Exploration Edition equipped with a five-axis folding bionic manipulator. Caijing New Media noted that compared with the released G30, the G30 Space Exploration Edition maintains the flatness of the product surface and the thickness of 7.98cm, while adding a five-axis robotic arm OmniGrip folded into the robot host, thus realizing the ability to store, remove obstacles and then clean.
Searching for this new product on the e-commerce platform, the page information shows that with the assistance of precision sensors, cameras and LED lights, the G30 Space Exploration Edition can intelligently identify and lift scattered objects within the rated load of 300 grams. AI calculates the best grasping position and classifies and stores them in the pre-programmed area, or cleans the blind area after lifting the object, and then completes the return of the object. The object recognition library contains 26 categories and 108 types of object information. New faces of obstacle avoidance beyond the scope can be expanded by entering categories in the App.
At the CES 2025 conference in January this year, Dreamie also unveiled a new sweeper with a robotic arm, which has a 30 cm extension distance, 6 cm clamping width, and 400 grams of clamping weight. The robotic arm is not retracted into the fuselage, but placed on the top of the fuselage. In addition to movable obstacles, you can also use the cleaning tools in the accessory compartment to assist in gap cleaning.
Previously, as a highly integrated intelligent device, the robotic arm has been widely used in aerospace, industrial manufacturing, medical rehabilitation, smart warehousing and other fields. However, it is not easy for bionic manipulator technology to enter family life, and manufacturers need to have deep accumulation of software and hardware technology.
Some leading manufacturers of sweeping machines have taken the lead in developing patent layouts for robotic arms. According to Kaiyuan Securities, the official website of the State Intellectual Property Office shows that at the end of 2022, Stone Technology applied for a total of 16 utility model patents/invention patent families named “mechanical joints, robotic arms and self-moving cleaning equipment”, which detailed the technical solution for the application of folding robotic arms in sweeping machines.
Dreame applied for a utility model patent named “a robotic arm joint, a robotic arm and a bionic robot” at the end of 2023, which mainly introduced the structure of the robotic arm joint, and applied for a total of two invention patent families of “control method of cleaning robot and cleaning robot” in mid-2024, introducing the operation method of sweeping machine products with robotic arms. Ecovacs also applied for a total of two patent families of “robotic arm system and joint device for its application” at the end of 2022.
In the view of Wuerqi, director of the MIA Research Institute of Stone Technology, if the robot is to be used in family life, it needs to be smart and flexible enough to solve problems, not just a toy. At the same time, the difficulty of developing a robot is extremely high. If the cost of the product is too high, ordinary families can’t afford it at all, and it doesn’t make sense. “Stone Technology’s five-axis bionic robot has a good balance of these problems and may be the best result of the robot in the home field at present.” He revealed that because of the addition of a robot, the sweeper has higher requirements for navigation and obstacle avoidance. Stone Technology has specially developed a new Star Array Navigation 3.0 system to upgrade the obstacle avoidance capability from the ground to space. And around human-computer interaction, the RRmind GPT large model in its App has been fully integrated with DeepSeek-R1 and will be officially launched in the near future. In addition to being able to provide troubleshooting and professional knowledge answers, it can also interact and chat at will. Kaiyuan Securities believes that in the past few years, the essence of the development of the global sweeper industry has been promoted around the three main lines of “functionality”, “intelligence” and “convenience”. In terms of functionality, it revolves around the core function of “sweeping the floor”, from the initial single sweeping function to the realization of sweeping and mopping in one, and further develops functions that adapt to more scenarios; in terms of intelligence, it is essentially a reflection of the continuous development of “robot” related technologies, and it has continuously iterated in navigation technology, going through multiple development stages such as “random collision”, “lighthouse navigation”, “VSLAM”, and “LDS-SLAM”. In terms of convenience, the industry has gone from “self-cleaning”, “self-dust collection” to “full base station”, committed to liberating hands and highly improving cleaning satisfaction. At present, the innovation of sweeping robots has not come to an end. AI technology will further enhance intelligence, and robot technology will further enhance functionality.
In its research report, it is analyzed that sweeping robots are still expected to continue to expand their capabilities and gradually evolve into the stage of home service robots. The mechanical arm carried by the current sweeping robot is only the first stage of development. During this period, the sweeping robot can realize the picking up and removal of simple obstacles such as socks, large paper balls and slippers, which solves the pain point of bypassing obstacles in the cleaning process, thus forming a blind spot for cleaning, and further broadens the capabilities beyond the ground cleaning function.
At the same time, the robotic arm can continue to evolve. It is expected that after the second stage of development, with the optimization of hardware, the development of AI technology and the continuous accumulation of algorithms, functions such as assisting obstacle crossing and going up and down stairs can be realized, and the types of objects that can be returned to their original positions will be further increased to objects with larger weight and volume. The third stage may evolve into a home service robot. From the perspective of ecological improvement, multiple home service robots can be dispatched by cloud AI to carry out intelligent division of labor and collaboration, and build a smart service system for the whole family through data sharing and hardware collaboration; industry leaders may launch a platform similar to ROS (Robot Operating System) to attract developers to develop customized functions (such as cooking assistance, green plant maintenance, pet interaction, game entertainment, etc.), and continuously meet users’ personalized needs through the “hardware + service” ecological closed loop.
The development dividends of the robot era also open up new directions for sweeping machine companies and executives.
In 2024, Dreame established a total scale of 11 billion yuan for the Chasing Robot Industry Venture Capital Fund, holding 55% of the shares, and invested in the angel round of the domestic humanoid robot company “Magic Atom”. In the same year, Yu Chao, the head of the humanoid robot business of Dreame and the head of the Innovation Robotics Research Institute, resigned to establish Luming Robotics; Guo Renjie, the former executive president of Dreame Technology in China, resigned to join the field of consumer robots.
Quan Gang, the president of Stone Technology, also said in an interview that “the sweeping robot is the best product that can be implemented at the technical level at that time. If it is developed into a humanoid robot, the requirements in the fields of safety performance and intelligence, especially safety performance, will be exponentially improved. In the future, it will definitely be a humanoid robot, but there is a long way to go.”
In his eyes, the future cleaning robot or household service robot should serve humans as an independent functional carrier unit, so its autonomy, self-management, self-planning, self-practice, self-action, including self-evaluation, must have a complete closed loop. It will serve humans by itself, and humans are the enjoyers and feelers of the product. For example, now, after dinner, I will command the robot vacuum cleaner to clean up the food residues on the floor next to the dining table. In the future, after I finish my meal, the robot will clean up by itself. I should not feel the process, and the robot will integrate seamlessly.”
Some research reports point out that the technological leap of the robot arm has led the vacuum cleaner into the era of embodied intelligence. As the product enters the application from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space through the robot arm, it is expected that the initial pricing of this type of product will be high, but more players will join in the future. On the one hand, iterative new products will drive the industry to further evolve towards a smarter product form. On the other hand, manufacturers will also make more attempts to reduce costs to promote the faster realization of terminal volume of products.
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