Hate mopping? Let a robot do it
 

Roomba, the vacuum cleaner that created a market for robot housecleaning appliances, has a new sibling. It's called Scooba, and it mops.

Scooba hopes to clean up during the holiday season.

On Monday, iRobot ? the company that invented Roomba ? offered a preview of Scooba, which won't be available until the holiday season. Scooba resembles Roomba ? something of a home bathroom scale on wheels. But where Roomba cleans rugs, Scooba cleans hardwood, tile, linoleum or any kind of bare floor.

Scooba roams the room using artificial intelligence. It scrubs the floor with cleaning liquid, rinses it, then sucks up the excess water and stores it to be dumped later. The promise from iRobot is that Scooba will clean better than a mop, which typically redistributes dirty water, iRobot CEO Colin Angle says.

A special cleaning fluid was developed in a partnership with Clorox to solve a particular problem: traction. With typical soaps, the Scooba would skid or spin its wheels. The Clorox fluid allows the wheels to grip. The company recommends using only the Clorox fluid.

Scooba's price hasn't been set, but Angle says it will cost slightly more than a Roomba. A Roomba Discovery model costs about $280.

IRobot has sold more than 1.2 million Roomba cleaners since the product's introduction in September 2002, spawning a rash of imitators ? not to mention an off-color Saturday Night Live skit. Roomba reached 1 million units sold worldwide more quickly than microwave ovens, which took nine years to get there.

Scooba should appeal to just as broad a market as Roomba, Angle says. "We aim our products at the axis of 'hate doing it' and 'have to do it often,' " he says. "Mopping is near the top of a lot of people's 'hate doing it' list."

Roomba, Scooba and other recent robot hits such as the Robosapiens programmable toy ? which walks, grunts and burps ? could help push home robotics to a new level. The industry, with about $4 billion in global sales this year, is "poised for spectacular growth," says Dan Kara of research firm Robotics Trends.

Last week, companies at the second-annual RoboBusiness conference in New York showed off products such as security robots, which could wander the house watching for intruders.

Angle says his goal for iRobot is eventually to make a suite of robots that do housework. "But it's going to take real energy and effort to do it at the right price," he says.

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