Smart home tech: four best robots and automated gadgets for your house and garden
The Evening Standard's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Lawn need cutting? Floor need to be hoovered or mopped? Put your feet up. You need trouble yourself with tiresome household chores no more with a fleet of robot servants on hand.
Automated home devices are getting smarter and smarter, so you no longer need to manage them quite so much as in the past, either.
The Honda Miimo 3000 will return itself to its docking station when it's running low on battery, while the Roomba i7+ is app or voice controlled meaning you needn't lift even a finger.
And most of these products have been around for a while in some form so have had any irritating faults and less useful features ironed out — on that note, when will the robot iron be invented?
Here are four of the best home cleaning robots currently on the market.
Scribit
Promising to crawl up and down any vertical plane, this clever robot inks the walls as it goes, turning them into giant interactive canvases, like the fun high diver on the right.
Think of it as a sort of plotter, using coloured pens to draw and producing up to 15 colour combinations. All you need is a power point.
It can draw any content sourced from the web, and there is a growing library of online designs to choose from, with everything from geometric patterns to inspirational quotes.
The Scribit can erase its work in a jiffy and start again, changing the designs according to your whim.
Price in the US, $449 (about £348) | Scribit | Buy it now
iRobot Roomba i7+
This robotic vacuum cleaner may be pricey but it has an invaluable feature: when it returns to its charging base it empties its dustbin into a disposable bag that holds 30 bins’ worth, so shouldn’t need emptying for weeks.
It makes its own map of your home and offers both app and voice controls, so you can tell it which rooms to clean from your sun lounger.
£1,199 | iRobot | Buy it now
iRobot Braava
If you have hard floors, an iRobot Braava robotic mop will make them shine. The smaller Braava jet 240 is designed to sweep and mop spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms and is able to whizz around objects such as loos and pedestals.
Meanwhile, the larger 390T can handle an open-plan living space of up to almost 1,000sq ft in a single pass, dry- or wet-mopping floors daily to ensure they are always clean and gleaming.
From £249.99 | iRobot | Buy it now
Honda Miimo 3000
Prepare for spring. Robo mowers aren’t cheap but they are huge time savers. This one can be scheduled via app and is so quiet that it can do the job in the middle of the night without disturbing anyone.
Miimo mows little and often, scattering the tiny clippings to fertilise the lawn. It automatically heads back to its docking station whenever it runs out of juice.
Big wheels mean it copes well with bumps and inclines, while it mows lawns of up to an acre.
£2,350 | Honda | Buy it now