Spit Shine Mitt: Save Your Dust Drama for This Llama

It seems as if no matter how hard I try, there’s always dust on every smooth surface in my house. Perhaps it’s all the dander that my two dogs kick up, or maybe the same thing happens to everyone, pets or no pets. I usually use a Swiffer duster to keep things clean, but I think this llama dust mitt looks like much more fun.

Fred calls their dust mitt the “Spit Shine,” which is only appropriate because of llamas’ tendency to spit when they’re riled up. That said, I don’t recommend actually spitting on this before you wipe down your countertops unless you want a sticky, germ-filled mess. Also, don’t try an use an actual llama to do your cleaning. It’ll only make matters much, much worse.

You can clean up your dusty old house for just under 15 bucks. The Spit Shine Llama Mitt is available now from Amazon. Spit sold separately.

This Little Robot Is Designed to Clean Toilets

We’ve seen machines designed to clean bathrooms before, but this one is an actual tiny robot that you lift up and put in your toilet. Altan Robotech’s invention, named “Giddel” has a humanoid shaped head so that you can feel extra weird about putting a small being into a toilet bowl.

Just get this guy out of his charging base and put him in your dirty toilet bowl. It attaches under the seat in the back thanks to a mounting plate that you have to install. Then it scrubs away while you and your wife get it on in front of the bathroom mirror. Don’t believe me? Skip to about 13 seconds into the video below. This couple just loves a robot audience:

Giddel’s big blue eyes are buttons. It’s child and pet-friendly, and it has built-in navigation, whatever the hell that means. I guess it means that it won’t start furiously brushing your kid or dog instead of staying in the toilet bowl.

The Giddel toilet cleaning robot is available now for an introductory price of $399.99. Sure, this little guy cleans your toilet, but who cleans him? You, that’s who. So it still gives you a chore to do. You’re just cleaning a filthy toilet cleaning robot instead of a filthy toilet. So that sucks.

Walmart’s Industrial Floor Cleaning Robot Doesn’t Make $15 An Hour

Walmart is always looking for ways to save, and with its $15 an hour minimum wage, it should come as no surprise that some workers are due to be replaced by automation. The first replacements were cashiers, with most Walmart locations now offering self-checkout lanes where you don’t have to listen to the cashier talk when all you want to do is pay and leave.

Now it’s the custodians that are being replaced with a ride-on floor scrubber that no longer needs a person to operate it. The robot is powered by BrainOS and has sensors to allow it to drive around the store, and to safely clean around customers.

Already more than 100 of the floor cleaning bots are in stores around the country. The retail giant plans to add 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing ‘bots to stores nationwide by January. The announcement was made jointly with Brain Corp, the company who makes the OS for the robot.

[via NBC News]

This Toilet Scrubbing Robot Is The Hero We Need

Household chores suck. If you ask me, the worst chore is scrubbing toilets. We all dread it. If only there were a robot that would do the job for us. Well, there is. A team of researchers from the University of Koblenz-Landau have created a robot that specializes in the dirty job.

This toilet-scrubbing bot can detect people, objects, and the toilet seat, and even has a microphone for speech recognition, as well as a mobile base for moving around. It can approach a toilet, clean the seat and even the floor around the toilet. It will even pick up stray pieces of toilet paper and toilet rolls. It’s not the sexiest looking robot, but it gets the job done – albeit very slowly.

Sadly, it will be a while until we see this bot in our homes, so until then stop peeing everywhere, will ya? And when it does arrive, it will hit public areas like malls and airports first. But maybe soon after we can get this in our homes, so that robots can do what they were made to do – get down on their robo-knees and clean our toilets. Please don’t kill me future robots. I was just kidding.

The toilet scrubbing robot may just be the single most important robotic development yet. Mankind thanks you researchers. You are creating beautiful things now instead of things that will kill us all.

[via Digital Trends via Mike Shouts]

Stormtrooper and Darth Vader Robotic Vacuums


Take your home from the Dark Side to the squeaky clean light side of the Force with the Darth Vader and Stormtrooper Samsung Powerbot Robotic Vacuums. Unlike real Stormtroopers, this vacuum never misses- any dirt- thanks to advanced mapping software and a full view sensor. You can schedule cleanings and check on it’s progress via the app.

These limited edition Roomba competitors have special Star Wars sound effects (like lightsabers and Darth Vader breathing) that activate when you give it various commands via the remote control. These vacuums integrate using WiFi with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and with more advanced controls via your smartphone and Samsung SmartThings. But best of all, they just look really cool.

Stormtrooper and Darth Vader Robotic Vacuums
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The iRobot Roomba i7+ Empties Itself

One thing that people hate about robot vacuum cleaners is that you still need to empty their filthy collection containers manually. Well, the new Roomba i7+ from iRobot solves this problem. Finally. The i7+ has an oversized dock that transfers dust and debris into a larger container with disposable waste bags.

Robot vacuums have to be small enough to squeeze into tight spaces and clean under furniture, but this means that their onboard dust bins can’t be very large. So a docking base that automatically sucks the robot’s tiny bin clean makes a lot of sense. The robot can dock about 30 times before the bag needs to be changed.

This fancy $950 model can also store the layouts of up to ten different floors, which are accessible through an app, and you can have it clean only the rooms you want. The i7+ also has improved sensors, mapping, battery life, and even suction power. Sure that price is expensive for a robot vacuum, but this one has some great new features that will make life even easier.

[via IEEE Spectrum via Gizmodo]

LEGO Roomba Sweeps Bricks off the Floor

You know you’re a LEGO fanatic when you have to build a sweeper out of LEGO just to clean all of the other LEGO pieces off your floor. The LEGO Rumba is just such a device. It’s part street sweeper, part dump truck, all awesome.

The Brick Wall’s sweeper is made of LEGO Technic pieces and it’s designed to clean up their room so they don’t step on any of those pointy bricks. It has an arm with a claw that can be remotely operated to pick up larger pieces, and a collection bin that gets emptied dump truck style when it’s full.

It seems to work pretty well, and that arm can pick up some very large pieces. If anyone out there is thinking about building a large LEGO city, you’re gonna want this thing to roam the streets, cleaning them up and picking up plastic trash from the curb. So I guess you’ll need a LEGO landfill too.

LEGO really needs to sell this to keep all of our feet safe. There’s nothing worse than stepping on LEGO pieces. Owie! This should be a mandatory accessory whenever a kid gets a LEGO set.

[via Laughing Squid via Geekologie]