Robot vacuums are a convenient way to keep your house clean without actually putting in much work, but they’ve all got one major problem—what if your house has multiple stories? At CES this year, I saw two attempts to fix this problem, but one of them was much more fabulous than the other.

Roborock has a robot vacuum with legs

This is the more unique of your stair climbing robot vacuums, and the one that’s new for this year. At CES 2026, robot vacuum company Roborock introduced the Roborock Saros Rover, which has two fold-out and individually articulated legs built into it, with wheels on either one.

This lets it act like a standard robot vacuum when it’s on flat terrain, but when it hits a pair of stairs, it will use its legs to slowly pull itself up and over them. And because those legs are individually articulated, unlike other solutions, it can clean those stairs while it climbs.

Plus, it can also run through fun programmable routines, like dancing and even hopping. Honestly, it looks a lot more cute than the other bipedal robots I’ve seen littering this year’s CES. Maybe that’s because it still serves a concrete purpose.

The problem? You’ll need to get the new model to benefit from the stair climbing, whereas competitors are introducing solutions that work with existing vacuums.

The Roborock Saros Rover also doesn’t have hard pricing or a release date yet, but Roborock assured me it isn’t a concept, and will make its way to market eventually. I was told the goal is this year, but the company couldn’t confirm that.

Dreame’s stair climbing robot vacuum dock

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Next to Roborock’s booth, I also saw another approach to a stair climbing robot vacuum from competitor Dreame. This actually showed up at German tech conference IFA last year, but it’s still worth bringing up, if only to highlight how different the Roborock is. Essentially, instead of building a single robot vacuum model with individual legs, Dreame instead built a dock that your existing robot vacuum can drive into, and then the dock will take it up the stairs like a taxi.

The catch is that, because the dock needs to be able to drive to the stairs, it does not use individually articulated legs to climb, and instead uses treads that move in sync with each other. This gets it up and down stairs with no problem, but unlike Roborock’s solution, it’s not able to clean while doing so.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

However, I’ll note that I did personally see Dreame’s dock go down a flight of stairs, something Roborock’s unit didn’t do in the demo I watched. Maybe this is a more stable approach.

Unfortunately, while Roborock said it’s definitely planning on bringing the Saros Rover to market, Dreame’s dock, called the Cyber X, is still just a concept, and may not actually ever make it to consumers.