The Robot Vacuum’s Next Humble Trick: Climbing Stairs

Stair-climbing robot vacuums are actually about to be a reality, sort of. That’s courtesy of a little baby trend at IFA 2025 of robot vacuums slipping into something more climbable—a little caddy that carries them upstairs when it’s time to move floors, then waits to carry them back down when they’re done. The first one we encountered was the Eufy MarsWalker.

Then, it turned out that Dreame had one, too, using almost the exact same approach, only it’s weirdly much scarier-looking. Both have a sort of Half-Life headcrab vibe, but where the MarsWalker really looks like, well, a robot meant to walk on Mars, Dreame’s version, the Cyber X, looks like it would be the nearly identical-to-the-hero villain if the two shared a 1990s Saturday morning cartoon series. Instead of the sleek stalks that the MarsWalker uses to pull itself onto stairs, the Cyber X has what can only be described as chainsaw hands—because Dreame elected to put the tank tread bits on the device’s little legs, not its body.

The two mostly work the same way; robot vacuum meets stair-climbing caddy and climbs in. They roll to the stairs and the caddy probes for the bottom step, then stretches out in front and back to roll up the stairs. There are mild differences in the execution here: while the MarsWalker doesn’t extend its little arms until it reaches the steps, the Dreame robot stands up on all fours to approach them.

Getting back down the stairs seemed a bit more precarious for the Cyber X than for the MarsWalker. In the (very sped-up) GIF above and another video I saw online, it had trouble keeping itself straight, and I worried that it might go tumbling. I didn’t feel that way about the MarsWalker.

I don’t know who actually came up with the idea first, but either way, the approach seems like a winner. But there is another way, as robot vacuum and lawnmower company Mova showed me. The Mova Zeus 60, which looks like a 1980s VCR or vinyl turntable (complimentary), raised itself up on little scissor-lift legs, then slid its little body forward like a robotic tongue, drew its legs up, and slid those forward to join the rest of it on the stairs, then repeated this for each step, and in reverse on the way down.

It took an agonizing six minutes to complete. One of Mova’s engineers, who was at the Mova booth, watching with me, assured me that it can go faster, but that the team decided to run it slower for safety reasons. I’ll accept that, but it would have to go quite a bit faster to catch its competition—Dreame’s robot got down and back up its stair set in close to 2.5 minutes. Eufy’s MarsWalker managed it in just 1 minute and 45 seconds. But Mova might have an advantage—according to that same engineer, it can handle spiral staircases just fine. Then again, as confident as he sounded, it would have been a great power move for the company to set up a little spiral staircase to prove it. Maybe it can do it and Mova chose not to show it off—building a spiral staircase for the show is a little more complicated than the straight up-and-down kind. Or maybe it’s not all that good at spiral staircases.

It’ll be interesting to see how these stair climbers shake out when they make it into reviewers’ grubby hands. Representatives from all three companies confirmed to me that the plan is to release their devices within the next year; none would reveal pricing. Maybe it hasn’t been decided, or they’re each just waiting to see what the other does.

However they do, none of these robots fully solve the problem. But climbing stairs is a huge first step. Or set of steps, I guess. The next task is getting them to actually clean the stairs, something the vaporware-at-this-point Ascender was supposed to do. And frankly, I don’t care. Bring me the stair-climbing robot, please.