Mint, the Little Robot That Cleans Your Floors

    It’s finally happened: We’re so lazy that we can’t even bother to take a dust mop to our wood floors.

    Criticisms of our society aside, this little Mint Automatic Floor Cleaner will be more than happy to accomplish that task for us.

    Working like a miniature GPS, Mint ()communicates with its North Star Navigation Cube, a black box that forms a digital map of wherever the little robot roams, and keeps things efficient by directing Mint to areas it hasn’t cleaned yet. The two work as a team, where Mint seeks the corners of a room, and communicates with its shiny black mother ship.

    There are two modes, one that works like a dust mop, and another takes care of wet mopping with a more vigorous back-and-forth scrubbing action. You place a wet or dry cleaning cloth onto its snap-in magnetic cleaning pad, select dry or wet mode by pushing one of the buttons on top, and then that little sucker is off and running.

    I charged Mint for about five hours, and then turned it loose on our wood floors. At first, it polished wide swaths of the floor as if it were mowing the lawn. Then it got more adventurous, digging into the corners and edges of the room until it had gotten the whole area clean.

     This is not a vacuum — it’s designed to avoid carpets and other obstacles. For the most part, it did a good job of staying on the wood or tile, but as you can see in the video above, it got a little confused with some of our area rugs. It’s so cute, we felt sorry for it as it moved back and forth, its tiny green lights blinking to indicate that it was trying to figure out what to do next.
With a little help from me, it was soon on its merry way.

    It’s not perfect. Its wet mopping routine was mediocre. It couldn’t press down hard enough to remove any dried-on stains, but it could at least accomplish a superficial wetting down of the floor. In wet mode, you need to baby-sit, re-wetting its cleaning cloth after 10 minutes because it dries out. So it would be even less effective if you left it to its own devices.

    On the other hand, its dry mopping was stellar. Take a look in the gallery below and see how much dirt this little sucker picked up! We thought we kept a fairly clean house, those are a LOT of dust bunnies Mint rooted out. It’s downright embarrassing.

    As one of our colleagues pointed out, it’s not that hard to dust-mop (or even wet-mop) the floor, but it’s tons of fun to set this beautifully designed $250 bot on its way, making its whisper-quiet whirring noise as it explores your floors, cleaning as it goes.