A robot vacuum is a mobile robot that must build a map and navigate it without human input, and the industry has settled on two competing ways to do that. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) mounts a spinning turret on top of the machine that fires a laser and times its reflection, building a precise 2D floor plan and locating the robot within it: it works in absolute darkness, but the turret adds height, a problem under low furniture, and cost. vSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) uses one or more cameras to recognise landmarks and triangulate position instead; it is cheaper, sits flush, and doubles as an object-recognition system, but it needs ambient light to work. Most premium 2026 models no longer choose one or the other: they run LiDAR for mapping, a camera for recognition, and a structured-light or ToF sensor array for close-in obstacle avoidance.
Everything current runs on brushless DC motors spinning an impeller at high RPM to pull air through the dust path; suction is marketed in Pascals (pa), with 2026 flagships claiming figures of 10,000 to 20,000pa that are more a marketing number than a like-for-like spec. The cleaning module itself pairs a main brush, a rubber roller or a bristle-and-rubber hybrid, with spinning edge brushes that sweep dust out from corners and skirting. The live frontier is the mop: vibrating pads that scrub light stains, dual counter-rotating pads for real scrubbing, and dock stations that wash the pads in clean water, wring the dirty water out, and hot-air dry them so the machine never parks on a damp mop.
As with everything in this series, the reference design sits one level down, at the chipset. Allwinner, out of Zhuhai, supplies the SoCs purpose-built for SLAM work: the established MR133 and the newer MR536MX, which folds in an NPU for AI-based obstacle recognition, distinguishing a shoe from a phone charger from a pile of pet mess. Rockchip's RK3562 is the chip behind flagships like the Ecovacs X5. This is the classic PRD ODM pattern: the brand writes a PRD specifying navigation type, suction power, mop system and dock features, and the ODM house builds the chassis around whichever silicon fits the spec, which is why the same chassis so often turns up under more than one brand name.
The frontier is the all-in-one dock: auto-empty dustbin, auto mop-wash with clean and dirty water tanks, hot-air drying, and even automatic detergent dispensing. Above this layer sit the brands — Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame — and the Allwinner and Rockchip silicon they all share.