You may already be using Chinese AI at home without giving it much thought. Not necessarily in the form of a chatbot, nor as a hidden function on the mobile, nor as another promise within the television. Maybe it’s in something much less solemn: a robot vacuum cleaner that runs across the floor of your living room while you do something else.
The history of the robot vacuum cleaner did not begin with devices running around pointlessly. He Electrolux Trilobitemarketed in Europe in the early 2000s, and the Roomba Intelligent FloorVacpresented by iRobot in 2002, already incorporated sensors and navigation routines to move around a home with a certain autonomy, although their capabilities were far from current ones. What has changed since then is the perception layer: advanced models no longer just detect walls or stairs, but build richer maps, recognize objects and make decisions with more context.
Electrolux Trilobite
The scale data helps to understand why this story is not just about technological curiosity. According to IDCthe global home cleaning devices market reached 32.72 million units in 2025, up 20.1% from the previous year. Within that universe, smart robot vacuum cleaners remained the main category, with 24.12 million units and a growth of 17.1%. IDC measures shipments, not installed homes, but the scale helps to understand the dimension of the phenomenon: we are talking about tens of millions of home cleaning robots moving through the global market in a single year.
AI also enters the house through the floor
The most striking thing is who occupies the center of that category today. In the first three quarters of 2025, the global Top 5 of smart robot vacuum cleaners consisted of five Chinese brands: Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, Xiaomi and Narwal. The consulting firm speaks of a reorganization of the market, with 17.42 million units shipped in that period and a year-on-year growth of 18.7%. The reading is quite clear: China is not entering this sector as an aspirant, but as the block that sets the commercial pace of an increasingly technological category.
And here the interesting thing begins: we are not just talking about a cleaning product. An advanced robot vacuum cleaner is probably one of the most complex home devices we can have moving around the house, because it must clean, orient itself, avoid problems and make decisions in an environment that changes every day. When he avoids a wire to avoid getting trapped, surround a sockdistinguishes a carpet or adapts its route room by room, there is more than just aspiration: there are sensors and artificial intelligence.
Xiaomi H50 Pro
At Xataka, for example, we have tested the Roborock Saros Z70, a robot vacuum cleaner with a robotic arm capable of lifting objects weighing up to 300 grams. In our experience, it reached for a sneaker, and Roborock claims it can also pick up socks, small towels, or tissues, although it doesn’t always recognize everything it finds.
When we talk about the artificial intelligence race, we usually look towards the great models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen, systems designed to summarize, schedule or respond from one screen. That terrain is still the most visible, but it is not the only one. China is also pushing a much more physical and everyday path: products capable of bringing perception, navigation and decision capabilities to household tasks.
The iRobot case summarizes the change of era very well. Roomba made the idea of the robot vacuum cleaner famous, but the company no longer occupies the central place it had for years: it was left out of the Top 5 global smart robotic vacuum cleaners indicated by IDC and declared bankruptcy before pass into the hands of the Chinese firm Picea Robotics. This, added to the most recent market data, suggests that the old Western benchmark lost ground while a new generation of Chinese brands conquered the market.
Images | Roborock | Electrolux | Xiaomi
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