Walmart Inc.'s warehouse division Sam's Club is adding 372 floor-scrubbing robots to its fleet, putting the devices in all 599 U.S. clubs. Sam's Club is also expanding a pilot program to test shelf inventory technology that can be added to the robots. A Sam's Club spokeswoman said Thursday that the floor cleaners will give employees more time to focus on serving club members. Walmart stores use the same autonomous floor scrubbers that are powered by an operating system developed by Brain Corp. and made by Tennant Co. Walmart said in late 2018 it was adding 360 of the robots to an initial 100 used in a pilot program. In April 2019, the Bentonville-based retailer said it would have the floor cleaners in 1,860 stores by the following February.

It's the boring stocks that let you sleep well at night, and that's because there is a lot of money being made in boring industries. Take the cleaning industry for example. Nobody wants to work in an unclean office environment, and there are rules and regulations that compel employers to make sure everything is up to snuff. All that means loads of cleaning needs to be done every night. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 2,384,600 building janitors and cleaners representing an annual spend of nearly $60 billion.

SharkNinja, a well-known marketer of home consumer products, has entered the American robotic vacuum market with a product that is priced to compete against iRobot's Roomba line of floor cleaners. It sells at a very favorable price point to iRobot's. SharkNinja has partnered with ECOVACS, a Chinese manufacturer of many robotic products including robotic vacuums and floor cleaners, to custom manufacture the new Shark ION Robot – thus SharkNinja isn't starting from scratch. On Singles Day (11/11/2016), online via the e-commerce giant Alibaba, ECOVACS sold $60.2 million of robotic products, up from $47.6 million in 2015. The star performer was a DEEBOT robotic vacuum which sold 135,000 units.

It's the 21st century, and robots are supposed to be doing everything for us now. As with personal jet packs, that hasn't happened. But Evolution Robotics' Mint is one of a number of floor-cleaning robots designed to lighten the housework load. Announced at CES earlier this year and shipping this fall, Mint is an automatic floor cleaner--not a vacuum like iRobot's Roomba. You put a wet or dry dust cloth on the removable cleaning pad, push a button, and Mint gets to work.