Wirecutter

With many of the same great qualities as the smaller Braava Jet 240, the Braava Jet m6 has a bigger battery and water tank, plus a sophisticated navigation system that lets it clean larger areas and even specific rooms on command. It struggles with rug edges and thresholds, though.

America's Test Kitchen

By far the most hands-off and intelligent mopping robot we tried, this model uses vSLAM, a navigation system that employs an onboard camera and motion sensor to plot an efficient route through a room. When paired with iRobot’s free app, this technology makes maps of your spaces and refines them with each use. After five runs, you can see a map of your home in the app, name different rooms, and mark off areas where you don’t want the mop to clean. The app allows you to instruct the robot to clean specific rooms, set an automatic cleaning schedule, and even coordinate cleaning with an iRobot vacuum for completely hands-off vacuuming and mopping in one go. It’s also compatible with Amazon Echo and Google Home (“Alexa, tell Braava to clean the kitchen”). That said, if you’re not interested in using an app, this mop is still easy to program and operate: three on-board buttons allow you to initiate a spot- or whole-room clean. No matter how you operate the mop (by app or by the on-board buttons), the robot automatically returns to its base for charging when it’s done cleaning (or when it needs a recharge while cleaning larger rooms). However, while this mop was hands-down the easiest and more pleasant to use, it still had a few drawbacks: its cleaning ability is more akin to a Swiffer than a mop, so it’s not great for deep cleaning—even after multiple passes with the robot we still had bits of caked-on smoothie on our kitchen floors. You’re also better off presweeping the floor if there is visible debris, as the robot’s sweeping pad is adept at picking up dust and hair, but can’t pick up larger pieces of food such as cereal grains or garlic peels and instead abandons them in the corners of the room. It also isn’t completely hands-off, as you’ll still have to switch out the mopping pad daily and refill the water tank once or twice a week. Finally, it was larger than some of the other robots we tried and couldn’t reach small or irregularly shaped spaces such as around and behind the sink and toilet in the bathroom. Like most robot cleaners, this mop works best at keeping clean floors clean, but when used regularly, it can prolong the time needed between deep cleans and keep your floors shining with hardly any effort on your part.

amazon.com

walmart

pcmag.com

target

This small, quiet bot automatically wipes down one or two rooms at a time, with less fuss and better results than other robot mops. It also costs less than most, and it may be more durable. If you run it regularly, your busiest rooms will never get too grimy.

This petite robot packed a fair amount of cleaning power for such a small machine. Like other models we tried, sweeping up food scraps wasn’t its strong suit, but its spray nozzle and triple-pass cleaning mopped our floors surprisingly well. Its smaller frame was also adept at maneuvering into tight spots, such as through a tangle of chair legs in the kitchen or around a pedestal sink and toilet in the bathroom. Since it’s so short, it can also scoot under bookshelves, dressers, and other pieces of low-sitting furniture (it unearthed a big ball of dust from one long-forgotten corner under a bed). iAdapt 2.0 technology helps the robot navigate intelligently around the room and provides great coverage, no matter what size room it was cleaning. Since it’s smaller, it takes longer (about an hour for a 100-square-foot kitchen, where other robots covered the same area in half the time) for it to complete its cleaning cycle. Also, it can only clean an area that measures about 150 to 200 square feet per charge. While it does work with iRobot’s app, the functions are limited; you can instruct the robot to clean or spot-clean from the app, but not schedule cleanings or instruct it to clean or avoid certain areas. We also thought the tiny water tank was a bit tricky to fill; we had to run the tap very slowly or else the tank overflowed, and there was no way to easily gauge how full the tank was.

Robot Mop Comparison