Last year a new robot vacuum was quietly introduced to the world: The Dirt Devil RoomMate. Being a vacuum, one would think that the Dirt Devil is more likely a competitor to the iRobot Roomba than it is to a Mint Cleaner, but the price point is definitely more on the Mint side, and as we’ll see, the features are, too. The Dirt Devil RoomMate is manufactured by the makers of the Dirt Devil line (as you would expect) who are also known as Royal Appliance Manufacturing Co.

In the box you get the robot vacuum, a battery charger, the battery, a manual, and a quick start guide. A little assembly is needed. The brushes aren’t on the robot when it ships. Those are literally a snap to put on. Then you insert the NiMH battery, charge it up, and you’re ready to roll. The battery takes four hours to charge and a charge lasts about an hour. The RoomMate has three status lights on the top. These are: “Battery Low”. “Clog”, and “Charging”. When the robot is charging, the light blinks. When the charging has completed, then the light turns solid.

Features
The feature set of this vacuum is pretty bare bones. It has two side brushes for sweeping dust, dirt, and debris into the path of its vacuum intake. It does something like the classic Roomba random behaviors while it cleans a room. So it spirals, does wall following, and bounces around in random directions. It always turns to the right (as far as I’ve noticed), and if you watch the robot at work, it goes through the same sequence over and over. Meaning that it will bounce around the room for a while, then it will spiral until it meets a wall. Once it meets a wall, it will follow the wall for a set amount of time, and then it will start bouncing around again.

Also like a Roomba, the RoomMate has a front bumper that tells it when it’s bumped into something. There are cliff sensors on the bottom of the robot which keep it from launching off the top stair of your living room. Dirt goes into a donut-shaped cup with a filter in it. The cup and the filter can be rinsed out and dried between uses, which is nice. The dual brushes extend the reach of the robot, so it doesn’t leave dirt in corners.

The vacuum is powerful enough to pick up most of the things that end up on a floor. I tested it around the holidays and noticed that it would pick up pine needles. So, besides dirt and dust, it will pick up hair, dust bunnies, and sand. One word of warning: The robot intake can get clogged with very large dust bunnies. The RoomMate is not designed for use on carpets, and my informal testing on a carpeted floor bore that out. It lacks the beaters and brushes that vacuum cleaners use to get dirt out of carpeting. It is very firmly a hard floor cleaner. It also doesn’t really know what to do about area rugs and mats. Sometimes it will climb up on them, and other times it will bounce off of them. I recommend removing rugs and mats when you clean the floor.

The Dirt Devil lacks a lot of the bells and whistles that iRobot has built into the Roomba over the years. It doesn’t have Dirt Detect, lacks a dock, cannot be scheduled, and there is no remote control. Roombas also seem to figure out how big a room is and vacuum for “long enough” to get a whole room. The RoomMate goes until the battery is dead.

The robot is smaller than a Roomba, and wider than a Mint Cleaner. It is shorter than a Mint, however, which means that it can get under more furniture. It is slow moving, and although it is more noisy than a Mint, it is much quieter than a Roomba. Like the Mint, it is incapable of inhaling cords and cables, and thus you don’t have to worry so much about those items when using the Dirt Devil. At the same time, like every single other robot floor cleaner in the world, it will get stuck in awkward places now and again. Ours gets stuck under an office chair that has low legs. So I have to move the chair out of the room when cleaning our office floor.

On the plus side, the robot moves more slowly and has a much more sensitive bumper. As a result, it doesn’t “rough up” things in your room as much as a Roomba does. One thing that it definitely has over the Mint Cleaner, is that it sucks things up. The Mint doesn’t do a good job on some things (like pine needles), and instead it tends to just push them into corners. This is not a problem with the Dirt Devil RoomMate. After using it for a couple of weeks, I definitely think this is a good product.

iRobot Roomba vs RoomMate

If you’re comparing these two devices, then you’re probably looking for a vacuum. If you’re looking for a vacuum cleaner, then you’re going to want to get a Roomba plain and simple. In the vacuuming department, Roombas do pretty much everything a Dirt Devil can do and better.

RoomMate vs Mint

The comparison between a Mint and a Dirt Devil isn’t so cut and dried. Both robots are built to sweep hard floors, like hardwood, linoleum, and tile. The RoomMate uses brushes and a vacuum. The Mint uses microfiber cloths and Swiffer cloths. The RoomMate runs around a room randomly until it runs out of juice, so it basically takes an hour to clean a room. The Mint maps as it sweeps, and can finish a regular sized room in fifteen minutes and is ready to do another room immediately. The Mint does a better job with dust bunnies, but not as good a job with larger debris. The Dirt Devil is better with larger debris, but you need to make sure that the intake doesn’t get clogged. The Mint is quieter. So it’s actually kind of a toss-up. I like both. A person would probably have to make the decision based on what is important to them.

Conclusion

When I found this robot, I figured that it would be another sort of unreliable, junky robotic vacuum. The RoomMate managed to change my mind. While it’s definitely outclassed by a Roomba, I think it’s pretty good for what it aims to be: A basic, no-frills hard floor cleaning robot. The RoomMate is available at Amazon. So is the Evolution Robotics Mint.

Just today, Amazon has a great sale on the Mint Clear. Check it out here, on Amazon. It’s 159.99. That’s 20% off the normal price.

Go to this post on Mint’s Facebook account and write an entry on why your mom deserves a Mint cleaner. The company has noted that if you’re a mom, you can certainly talk about why you deserve one too. While you’re there, read other people’s entries and if you think one deserves to win, vote it up by “Liking” it. The post with the most “Likes” will be the winner.

I just visited the page myself, and as of this writing, it looks like there certainly aren’t a lot of entries, and not a lot of Likes. A resourceful person could probably get their entire family to join in and win this thing.

Your mom probably doesn’t have to be into robots to enjoy a Mint. She just needs to be into having a little automated helper.

Yes we finally got our hands on a Mint automatic cleaner to review here on our site. It’s very exciting! Let’s start with the shot everybody probably wants to see. What our Mint robot cleaner came up with after sweeping our bedroom (including under the bed.)

The first time the Mint came out from under the bed, it looked like it had a beard made out of dust bunnies! We’re really impressed with the performance of the robot and are surprised at how quiet it is. More on that later. For now, let’s move on to what you get when you order one.

I’m going to say up front that Evolution Robotics is not going to win any awards for how “green” their packaging for the Mint automatic floor cleaner is. The box is really big for the size of the product.

It opens up like a clam shell to reveal the robot on one side and the accessories on the other.

Here are the accessories that come with the basic kit. You get the Evolution Robotics Northstar beacon, washable microfiber cleaning pads, a charger for the robot, and two C batteries for the Northstar beacon. The batteries are a really awesome thing! I hate getting something home and then finding that I have to run to the store to pick up some batteries. Evolution Robotics scores some major points with me for including them in the package.

Besides the batteries (and the robot, of course), here was my favorite item that came in the box. A quickstart page. I love these kinds of things, because they get you up and running without having to sit down with the manual. The Mint robot comes with a manual for those of you who want to read it. It’s easy enough, however, to use the robot without one. As a matter of fact, I still haven’t checked out the manual.

The Mint robots are designed to sweep your floors with disposable Swiffer Pads, but they also ship with more eco-friendly washable microfiber pads. The point of these pads is to sweep the floor and grab onto the dust, dirt, hair, and grit so that you’re not just spreading it around or pushing it into corners. Both the included microfiber pads and the Swiffer pads attach to the cleaner attachment easily and securely. A little bit of either one sort of sticks off of either end of the robot, and this bugged me a little, but when I watch the robot go around the room, it doesn’t seem to hurt at all, and even looks like it probably helps the Mint pick up more dirt from corners and awkward spaces.

So you get the Mint robot, a charger, the Northstar beacon, three microfiber cleaning pads (one for wet, two for dry), a manual, and batteries. The English part of the manual is 28 pages long. The manual has the following sections:

• Safety Instructions
• Mint’s Features
• Mint’s Button and Lights
• How Mint Cleans
• Sweep and Mop Modes
• Operating Mint
• Battery and Charging
• Maintenance
• Customer Support
• Trouble Shooting
• Limited Warranty

I just spent a minute checking out the manual, and it is very clear and understandable. It’s funny, because the robot blinks its lights certain ways while it’s cleaning and it turns out that I was right about what I thought it was doing.

Here’s another shot of a job well done. I kind of figured the Mint would work, but I do have admit that I was curious to see if it really worked. I was worried that maybe it was an over-hyped marketing scam or a faulty, poorly-designed, error-prone lemon, or didn’t really clean. Maybe it would be really confusing to use. Maybe it would just push all the dirt into the corners and leave it there. Instead it has been a sweeping dynamo! It’s so easy to use. This is what it looked like coming out from under our bed. There are a lot of items of furniture the Mint fits under. It came out from under one of our dressers pushing a full piece of 8.5 x 11 paper. I grabbed the paper, and it went back under the dresser and came out with another full piece! It was like, “Thank you. I will go get the other one now.”

While it is cleaning, the robot is very quiet. It does softly bump into things, but that doesn’t make much noise. If you’ve ever had a Roomba or another robot vacuum cleaner like a Roomba, you’ll definitely appreciate how quiet the Mint is in operation.

Our entire house is hard wood floors, tile, or linoleum. I’m happy to report that the Mint automatic floor cleaner does a great job on all of them. We’re glad that now we don’t have to sweep the floor every week. We can have the Mint do it twice a week. The difference in how clean our house is now is very noticeable. If you can’t walk across your living room without getting a piece or two of grit stuck to the bottom of you foot, it’s time to get a Mint robot!

Evolution Robotics has announced that the Mint Automatic Cleaner is now available for pre-order in the United States.

Hello!

Since our debut at CES 2010, the buzz about Mint has been growing! CNET, PC Magazine, Fox Business News and many others have been talking about us. And Mint was just featured on the TODAY show! You can watch the video and check out the latest stories and reviews on our website.

In fact, the response has been so overwhelming, we decided to make Mint available for pre-order. All it takes is a $20 deposit to reserve one of the first Mint Automatic Floor Cleaners. Visit our site for details and to submit your reservation form. (Later note: Evolution is no longer taking reservations. The Mint is now available for order from such websites as Amazon and Hammacher Schlemmer.)

Thanks for following our progress! We hope you’re as excited about Mint’s arrival as we are. And if you’ve got comments or suggestions – please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Cheers,

The Mint Team

P.S. Coming soon: Mint cleans Martha’s floors. Tune in to the Martha Stewart Show on February 24th to see it live.

This video shows how the Mint automatic cleaner is built for one purpose only: to clean hard surface floors. To clean floors it uses cloths from Swiffer and Pledge. These are cleaning cloths which are specially manufactured to trap dirt so that you’re not just pushing it around when you clean. These cloths also come in wet versions and dry. The wet cloths use dirt-dissolving liquids that grab dirt from surfaces.

This video shows how a standard cloth is attached to the front of the Mint robot cleaner. Mint picks up hair, dirt, and dust from floors. For use with wet cloths, the robot uses a special mop mode. In this mode, the Mint rolls forward and back and side to side. It uses this motion to mop up ground-in dirt and grime.

These robots are really small, being only ten inches wide. This makes it easy for them to clean in tight spaces such as between chair legs and under sofas.

This video shows how the the Mint automatic floor cleaner is smart. It uses a NorthStar beacon to track its progress around a room so that it won’t miss any spots while it is sweeping a room. Because it uses navigation technology, it cleans floors in a methodical, systematic way which is very efficient.

Designed into the robot is “perfect edge technology”. The Mint robot uses this to find edges and follow them in such a way that it won’t miss corners. It picks up dirt that gets pushed into edges. The Mint automatic cleaner comes equipped with a bunch of sensors to help it navigate. These help the cleaner avoid area rugs and carpets, and will also keep the robot from driving off of steps or down the stairs.

This video shows how the Mint automatic floor cleaner is simple to use. First you take a cleaning cloth such as a Swiffer or equivalent and you put it on the removable front cleaning pad of the robot. The cleaning pad is held on magnetically, so it is a snap to take off, zip on the cloth, and then put back into place.

Once the cleaning cloth is attached, you put the robot on the floor, turn it on, choose wet mode if applicable, and then press play. The automatic cleaner is very quiet. You can have a phone conversation in the same room as the robot goes about its business.

When the Mint cleaner finishes sweeping the floor, it returns to its starting point and turns itself off. That way it doesn’t run the batteries down.

A handle built into the back of the cleaner makes it easy to pick up and carry. Then you just take off the cleaning cloth and put the robot in a cabinet or storage space. The Mint automatic floor cleaner is small and thus doesn’t take up a lot of space.

Mattress Cover – Duvet Cover – Pillow Cases

We also have updated information on how much floor a Mint expected to be able to cover on a single battery charge. The Mint is expected to operate three to four hours on a charge, and can cover around 1000 square feet during that time. This ends up being better than the amount a Roomba can cover in the same amount of time, which makes sense, considering a Roomba vacuum cleaner covers the same space in a more haphazard manner. The Mint floor cleaner actually maps out the space and covers it methodically.

What remains to be seen is if consumers will spend that much money for something that doesn’t suck. (Get it?)