Scooba floor-washing machine cleans, but not deeply
Published 12:01 am Sunday, April 3, 2011
The engineers at iRobot Corp. continue to fill the world with wondrous robots, the latest being a compact floor-washing machine called the Scooba 230.
I tested the $300 robot on some kitchen and bathroom floors, pockmarked with the spills, splashes and activity of your typical four-person, one-dog household.
The device smartly covered rooms of various sizes with its unique path-plotting software methods, though I soon learned that making a floor truly clean is better accomplished using old-fashioned elbow grease.
This is not to say the Scooba 230 didn’t perform as designed. By definition, it is a floor-washing robot that can make an already-swept floor cleaner. It simply doesn’t have the abrasive scrubbing power necessary to get up most common spills.
Set-up is simple. After inserting the battery and charging the robot overnight, I filled it with water and put in a small packet of iRobot’s liquid cleaner.
The folks at iRobot also make industrial-strength robots. But the final frontier may still be, quite simply, conquering a proper scour of the kitchen floor. And they’ve come up just a bit short with this robot.
