The New Relative's All Wet!

Roomba allows you to stop worrying about vacuuming your floors, and now its cousin, the Scooba Floor Washing Robot, will take care of your mopping and scrubbing too. Scooba's following in its predecessor's footsteps (so to speak) as the first floor-washing robot. Who says water and electronics don't mix?

Scooba is the direct result of customer feedback: iRobot customers said they wanted a robot floor-washer, and they got one. Scooba does it all: it preps, washes, scrubs, and dries your floor, all at once, with very little input from you. Like Roomba, it gets into hard-to-reach places, is simple to use, and does all the dreaded dirty work for you. Like Roomba, it includes a Virtual Wall so you can limit its movements. It even avoids danger situations like drops and steps, and is smart enough to clean around the edges of carpets. It can handle various floors with ease: tile, linoleum, marble, and sealed hardwood are no problem. Early on in the development process, iRobot teamed with Clorox to create a special cleaning fluid that's easy on floors, hard on dirt, and contains no bleach. It took the engineers a while to find a tire material that could maintain traction in all circumstances on all floors, but they managed, and Scooba performs like a champion.

Scooba is, if anything, even harder-working than Roomba. It uses a four-step process to clean floors, all in one pass.

1. A vacuum process sucks up dust, dirt, and loose items and puts them away in a debris bin.
2. Next, the cleaning solution is sprayed onto the floor; Scooba always uses fresh cleaning solution, instead of just spreading the dirt around as a mop might.
3. Then a sturdy brush scrubs the floor clean
4. and finally, the dirty solution is sucked up and stored away.

Naturally, especially dirty areas get extra attention. The robot holds enough cleaning fluid to clean a good-sized kitchen; all you have to do is add cleaning solution, tell it to start cleaning, and come back and empty it out when it's done. Don't you just love modern technology?

The Scooba family has recently grown to include three models: the 5800, the 350, and the 380. All three versions use the same technology; the only difference is that the 5800 can clean up to 250 square feet; the 350 cleans up to 500 square feet; and the 380 cleans up to 850 square feet -- that is, about four rooms. Unlike the others, the Model 380 comes with a free Replenish Kit, a storage mat, and a charging base.

November 2008: Latest updates are in green.

On to part nine:

• Build On This ~ iRobot Create
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