iRobot's Scooba Floor Washing Robot, the follow-up to the hugely successful Roomba home vacuum, neatly avoids the sophomore slump—not by a great distance, but by enough for you to consider it your new home floor-mopping companion.

From the outside, the Scooba looks like Roomba's big, blue brother. It's still round, but the Scooba is heavier (it weighs 10 pounds), taller, and wider than the Roomba vacuum. In addition, where Roomba simply vacuums up dirt, the Scooba sweeps, scrubs, mops, and even dries the floor. It does all this with very little interaction from you: The Scooba's robot brain lets it map out your room, navigate obstacles, and know when it has cleaned the entire room. Roomba's core processor and programming did all this, too; in fact, both products have virtually the same navigational software.

Inside the Scooba is a Rube Goldbergesque design for picking up dirt, applying a cleaning solution, and collecting dirty water and debris. One of the key mopping innovations here is that the Scooba applies only clean water and its Clorox brand cleaning solution to floors. In traditional mopping, you dip your mop in and out of a rickety bucket filled with increasingly dirty water.

This is exactly how my wife and I mop the floor. In fact, just a few weeks ago she was mopping when she accidentally tipped the bucket and deposited two gallons of dirty water in the kitchen and dining area. The day before I brought the Scooba home for a test run, I told my wife not to sweep or mop. She smiled brightly and said, "Oh, twist my arm."

Despite its robot status, the Scooba's instruction manual is, as with any good appliance, brief and to the point. The robot has just two buttons: Power and Clean. Power status is indicated by red and green lights on the Power button, and cleaning process messages appear via the Clean button light. Like the Roomba, the Scooba also uses auditory signals to let you know when it's about to begin cleaning and when it's done. There's also a Service Code indicator and message lights that tell you when to check its tank, when the Scooba is stuck, and when something is stopping the scrubbing roller brush.

Preparing the Scooba to clean is easy; it actually takes longer to prepare your room for cleaning. As with normal mopping, you should remove furniture, chairs, and other floor-bound items. You should also pick up large debris that will not fit under the Scooba (it has only about a quarter inch of clearance) or could jam up the robot's inner workings. The Scooba ships with one "virtual wall," a device that emits an infrared beam that the Scooba will not cross. I initially placed this between my dining area and den. The Scooba normally will detect a rug (if it wanders onto it) and back off or stop cleaning, but my den rug has no pile and the Scooba might have gone right over it.

You do have to pour liquid in and out of the Scooba, but don't worry about getting the technology wet. The unit separates into two parts. You press down the carrying handle and the top part, which contains the clean-water and dirty-water tanks and the removable brush, comes off from the bottom, which contains the motors, wheels, motherboard, and rechargeable battery. The Scooba ships with one 8-ounce bottle of Clorox cleaning solution. You pour 2 ounces—which you measure out in the supplied measuring cup—into the clean-water tank and then fill it to the lip with warm, clean water. iRobot says that the solution will clean a 200-square-foot room before it needs replacing. I filled the tank twice during a cleaning marathon of 1 hour and 45 minutes.

When you've filled the clean-water tank, you place it back on the Scooba, close the unit up, and hit Clean. It doesn't matter where you put the Scooba, it will immediately begin using iRobot's proprietary algorithm to start mapping out and cleaning the room. It uses numerous methods to learn the environment, including spiraling. To the uninitiated, the Scooba will look like one confused robot as it turns and crisscrosses your room, but Roomba owners will recognize this behavior. I still think it's best to set iRobot's cleaning robots and walk away. The Scooba's 80-dB whirring is louder than the slosh of a mop, but not annoying.

Our kitchen and dinning area is our prime living space, and this points up one of the Scooba's problems. The Scooba takes longer to mop a floor than you would if you did it yourself. That's not necessarily a issue unless you need to get back in that room. We needed to get back into the kitchen about a third of the way through the cleaning process. Although the Scooba squeegees the floor nearly dry as it cleans, it was sometimes underfoot as we tried to move about the two rooms.

I also had to move my virtual wall halfway through because the Scooba, just like its brother Roomba did, got stuck under my hutch. Oddly, it never stopped trying to clean and the "I'm stuck" light never came one, but make no mistake—it was stuck. I pulled it out, turned the robot around, and then, to prevent the Scooba from rolling under the hutch again, I put the virtual wall in front of it. I used some furniture to block the den entrance. The Scooba really should ship with two virtual walls.

iRobot also needs to work on the Scooba's messaging a bit. The Check Tank light lit blue halfway through cleaning the adjoining rooms, which have tile floors of 10 by 10 and 10 by 14 feet. This indicated that the clean-water tank was empty. Granted, I have what's called a "great room," where the dining area and kitchen are only partially separated by an island, and that's a lot of floor to cover. But these are becoming increasingly common in homes today, and it would be nice for the Scooba to be able to clean it all without emptying the tank.—Continue reading...