The Best Robot Mop System: Flat, Spinning, or Roller?When it comes to designing a mopping robot, there are a number of approaches you can pick from, including just having the movement of the robot push the soggy mop over the floor, having spinning pads, or even a big spinning roller. But what difference does it make? Recently the [Vacuum Wars] channel ran a comparison to find out the answer.The two spinning pad design is interesting, because it allows for the bot to move closer to objects or walls, and the base station doesn’t need the active scrubber that the simple static pad requires. The weakness of both types of flat mop design is that they are quickly saturated with dirt and moisture, after which they’ll happily smear it over the floor.The spinning roller is the most complex, with the robot having its own onboard water tank, and a way to extract the dirty water from the mop and store it for disposal in the base station. Theoretically this would be the clear winner, with basically all of them having features like avoiding carpet.Taking the test data from 150 different mopping robots that were made to clean up dried-up coffee stains, the results weren’t as clear-cut as one might perhaps expect due to the very limited scope of the test. But the comments to the video are perhaps more revealing. After all, most people don’t briefly run their robot mop over a few dried-up stains, but are faced with more severe real-life scenarios.One commentator mentions their dogs dragging in a lot of mud on rainy days, in which case the spinning pads robot would end up spreading a thin film of mud across the floor. After upgrading to a spinning roller version this issue was resolved, though it’s readily admitted to be the more expensive system, with a much larger base station.When in the video you see the details of what each approach involves on the side of the robot, the base station and the human caretaker, trade-offs are clear. Having the fixed flat pad is simple, but moves all complexity to the base station, with the spinning pads removing at least the need to motorize the base station. If you have small children or pets with muddy paws around, neither option works well, so you either have to whip out the human-powered mop or shell out for the high-end robotic solution.Of course, you can also build your own super-charged robot mop, or a very thorough one, but definitely avoid mopping robots that are too cheap to actually work.youtube.com/embed/Tz6U9QkXn5I?…hackaday.com/2026/01/17/the-be…