At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Roborock extended its vision of autonomous living beyond the vacuum-mapped floor, unveiling machines designed to clean pools, mow lawns, and navigate the uneven thresholds of real homes — each one an argument that human time is too precious to spend on maintenance. The company, already the world's top-selling robotic vacuum brand in the first half of 2026, is now staking its identity on a broader philosophy: that automation, applied thoughtfully across every surface a household contains, can return to people something they rarely think to reclaim. A new partnership with
Roborock Expands Smart Home Ecosystem at IFA 2026 with Pool Cleaner and Advanced Vacuums
Every minute spent on housework is time taken away from family.
Mark
So Roborock is basically saying their job is to give people back their time. That's the pitch?
Mimi
That's the core of it. Every product they showed—the pool cleaner, the vacuums, the mower—is built around the idea that you shouldn't have to spend your evening scrubbing your pool or your Saturday morning mowing. The machines do it autonomously.
Luke
But we should be clear: this is a press release from the company. We don't have independent testing data on whether these machines actually deliver on that promise. The specs are impressive on paper—36,000 pascals of suction, the ability to cross 8.8-centimeter thresholds—but real-world performance is different.
Mark
What about the pool cleaner? That seems like a genuinely new product category for them.
Mimi
It is. They've never made a pool cleaner before. The RockAqua P1 is their first one. It's designed to handle irregular pool shapes, which is actually a hard problem because pools aren't rectangular boxes. They have walls, waterlines, shallow ends.
Luke
The specs say it can work down to 15 centimeters depth and has a 3.5-hour runtime. But we don't know how that translates to an actual residential pool. Is that enough time to clean a typical backyard pool? Does it actually get the walls clean, or just the floor? Those are questions the press release doesn't answer.
Mark
And the Real Madrid partnership—what's that really about?
Mimi
On the surface, it's two global leaders in their respective fields joining forces. Real Madrid has won 15 Champions League titles. Roborock is the number one robotic vacuum brand globally in the first half of 2026. The company is saying they share a commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.
Luke
It's also a marketing play. Real Madrid has enormous global reach, especially in Europe and Latin America. For Roborock, which is trying to expand beyond Asia, that's valuable. But the partnership itself—what does it actually entail? The press release doesn't say. Is it just a sponsorship? A co-branded product? We don't know.
Mark
So we have a lot of new products, ambitious claims, and a celebrity partnership. What's the actual story here?
Mimi
The story is that Roborock is trying to become more than a vacuum company. They're building an ecosystem—pool care, lawn care, wet-dry cleaning. They're betting that if they can automate enough of household labor, people will buy multiple devices from them.
Luke
And they're doing this at a time when they already own the robotic vacuum market. So the question is whether they can replicate that dominance in these new categories, or whether they're overextending. We won't know the answer for at least a year or two, when we see actual sales data.
The Pulse
- Roborock's first pool cleaner, the RockAqua P1, plunges the company into entirely new territory — a submerged robot that scrubs floors, walls, and waterlines and parks itself at the surface when finished, challenging the assumption that pool maintenance must remain manual.
- Two flagship vacuums, the Saros 20 Flow and Qrevo Edge 3 Pro, push robotic mobility to its limits with 36,000 Pa suction and the ability to cross thresholds nearly nine centimeters high — engineering feats aimed squarely at the messy, uneven reality of actual homes.
- The F25 series and the RockNeo Q2 LiDAR mower expand the ecosystem further, with steam-cleaning floors and cable-free lawn trimming that cuts within three centimeters of obstacles, shrinking the gap between robot capability and human finishing work.
- A headline partnership with Real Madrid reframes Roborock not merely as a hardware company but as a global brand with championship-level aspirations, borrowing the club's mythology of relentless pursuit to narrate its own expansion story.
- The central tension underlying every product announcement is whether consumers will trust — and invest in — a fleet of autonomous machines, accepting the trade-off of purchase and upkeep for the hours of labor they promise to absorb.
At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Roborock extended its vision of autonomous living beyond the vacuum-mapped floor, unveiling machines designed to clean pools, mow lawns, and navigate the uneven thresholds of real homes — each one an argument that human time is too precious to spend on maintenance. The company, already the world's top-selling robotic vacuum brand in the first half of 2026, is now staking its identity on a broader philosophy: that automation, applied thoughtfully across every surface a household contains, can return to people something they rarely think to reclaim. A new partnership with Real Madrid signals that this ambition is as much about global cultural presence as it is about engineering.
At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Roborock arrived not with a single product but with a philosophy made physical: that the hours people spend cleaning are hours quietly stolen from the rest of their lives. The company, which leads global robotic vacuum sales through the first half of 2026, used the show to argue that autonomous cleaning should extend to every surface a household contains — including the pool.
The RockAqua P1, Roborock's first pool cleaner, is a submerged robot that works across floors, walls, and waterlines, drawing water at 6,800 gallons per hour through dual-stage filtration. It runs for up to three and a half hours, navigates using a single camera, recognizes dirt patterns in real time, and parks itself at the waterline when finished. The device applies lessons from years of indoor navigation to an entirely different environment, reducing the labor that pool ownership has always demanded.
Indoors, two new flagship vacuums push the boundaries of robotic mobility. The Saros 20 Flow and Qrevo Edge 3 Pro both deliver 36,000 pascals of suction and can cross thresholds as high as 8.8 centimeters — a meaningful advance in homes with uneven flooring. The Qrevo Edge 3 Pro's slim profile allows it to reach under furniture as low as 7.95 centimeters, while both models use a navigation system called RetractSense to map complex home layouts. For wet-dry cleaning, the F25 series offers steam and hot-water jets for stubborn stains, and a modular version that consolidates five tools into one swappable system.
Outdoors, the RockNeo Q2 LiDAR robotic mower handles lawns up to 800 square meters using solid-state lidar and a vision system for obstacle detection — no perimeter cables required. Its floating cutting deck trims grass within three centimeters of obstacles, narrowing the gap between what a robot can finish and what a person still has to.
To punctuate its global ambitions, Roborock announced a partnership with Real Madrid. Company president Quan Gang drew a direct parallel between the club's refusal to rest on past titles and Roborock's own posture toward innovation. The alliance is as much a statement about brand identity and international reach as it is a marketing arrangement — a signal that Roborock intends to compete not just in product categories but in cultural stature. Whether consumers embrace the full ecosystem will depend on whether the devices deliver on their promises, and whether the trade-off of owning and maintaining a fleet of robots feels, in practice, like freedom.
At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin this week, Roborock laid out an ambitious vision for what it calls human-centered cleaning—a philosophy that treats automation not as a luxury but as a way to reclaim time. The company, which holds the number one position in robotic vacuum sales globally in the first half of 2026, unveiled a lineup that extends well beyond the living room floor.
The centerpiece is the RockAqua P1, Roborock's first pool cleaner. It's a submerged robot designed to handle the irregular geometry of residential pools, working across floors, walls, and waterlines down to 15 centimeters of depth. The machine draws water at 6,800 gallons per hour through a four-liter debris basket fitted with dual filtration—one stage at 180 microns, another at 70—and runs for up to three and a half hours on a charge that takes the same amount of time to complete. It navigates using a single camera for obstacle detection and can recognize dirt patterns in real time, then parks itself at the waterline when the job is done, making retrieval straightforward. The move signals Roborock's intention to apply what it has learned about autonomous navigation and debris removal to water-based cleaning, reducing the manual labor that pool ownership traditionally demands.
On the vacuum side, Roborock introduced two flagship models that push the boundaries of what robotic mobility can achieve indoors. The Saros 20 Flow and the Qrevo Edge 3 Pro both pack a 36,000 pascal suction motor and an upgraded chassis system that allows them to cross double-layer thresholds as high as 8.8 centimeters—a significant engineering hurdle in homes with uneven flooring. The Saros 20 Flow uses a roller mop for wet cleaning, while the Qrevo Edge 3 Pro achieves a profile slim enough to slide under furniture as low as 7.95 centimeters, a dimension that opens access to spaces most robots cannot reach. Both are equipped with a navigation system called RetractSense that handles localization and mapping in complex home layouts.
For households that need wet-dry capability, Roborock introduced the F25 series. The F25 Ultra Steam Gen 2 combines high-temperature steam with hot-water jets to dissolve stubborn, dried stains, and adjusts its power output based on the floor type it detects. The F25 Pro Turbo Combo takes a modular approach: a detachable drive unit and swappable heads allow it to function as a wet-dry vacuum, a cordless handheld unit, or a furniture cleaner, consolidating five tools into one system.
Outdoors, the company introduced the RockNeo Q2 LiDAR, a robotic mower built for lawns up to 800 square meters. It uses a solid-state lidar sensor for environmental mapping and a secondary vision system for obstacle detection, eliminating the need for perimeter cables or boundary markers. The mower's floating cutting deck and precision edge module can trim grass within three centimeters of obstacles, reducing the manual finishing work that robotic mowers typically require.
Quantifying the company's ambition, Roborock announced a partnership with Real Madrid, the football club with 15 UEFA Champions League titles and 36 La Liga championships. Quan Gang, Roborock's president, framed the alliance as a meeting of two organizations that refuse to settle: "Like Real Madrid, we never rest on past achievements. We continue to push the boundaries of what is possible." The partnership represents both a marketing alignment and a statement about Roborock's global expansion strategy as it moves beyond vacuums into a broader ecosystem of autonomous cleaning devices.
The company's underlying philosophy, articulated repeatedly at the show, treats household labor as time stolen from family and personal pursuits. Every minute spent cleaning is a minute not spent elsewhere. By automating these tasks, Roborock argues, it returns that time to the user. Whether that framing resonates depends partly on whether the devices work as promised and partly on whether consumers believe the trade-off—purchasing and maintaining these robots—is worth the hours saved. The product lineup suggests the company is betting heavily that it is.
Notable Quotes
Our mission is to give time back to our customers by automating everyday tasks. Every minute spent on housework is time taken away from family, passions, and personal well-being.— Quan Gang, President of Roborock
Like Real Madrid, we never rest on past achievements. We continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and strive for excellence for our global community.— Quan Gang, President of Roborock
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