Say Goodbye to Messy Mops

If you work all day as I do, it’s always nice to come home to a clean house. I hate to take off my shoes and step on little crumbs or leftover cat food on the floor, that’s one of my pet peeves. It’s not like I have a floor-cleaning fairy or can afford to pay for a maid, but I definitely need help cleaning up with my busy schedule.

iRobot has solved that problem with its robots. iRobot’s products are aimed at the “hate to do it” and “have to do it often” chores. In the future iRobot will eventually launch an entire suite of housework robots. But for now, it’s best known for the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, which hit store shelves in September 2002 and sold approximately 1.2 million since. The latest edition to the iRobot family is a robotic mop called Scooba.

Scooba safely scrubs hardwood, tile, linoleum or any other bare floor. It sprays and scrubs water and cleaning fluid onto the floor as the robot’s front end passes over. The back end then sucks the excess water into the dirty water tank to be dumped using its artificial intelligence. iRobot recommends only using Clorox for the cleaning fluid to prevent the Scooba from skidding or spinning its wheels. A partnership with the Clorox Company and iRobot was formed to develop a specially engineered cleaning solution for Scooba.

Scooba has many of Roomba’s features but it’s more complicated because of the design to automatically vacuum, scrub and dry hard floors, and not just vacuum. It is 13 inches in diameter and four inches high, keeping the similar shape of the Roomba. There are two tanks attached, one for the water/cleaning fluid mixture and one for the dirty water.

No exact price has been established yet for the Scooba, but it will be a little more than a Roomba, which sells for $150 to $300. You can watch a demonstration of the Scooba at www.irobot.com and dream of your own freedom from the mop.