Narwal's first mattress vacuum heats, taps, UV-blasts and sucks up all the ick living in your bed At CES, the robotic cleaning brand also showed off its new flagship mop vac than can track down your pets. The Narwal U50 series mattress vac held aloft on the CES Unveiled floor. Narwal brought new cleaning robots with it to CES this year, including the Narwal Flow 2, it's latest flagship robo mop-vac, and the Narwal U50, an automatic mattress vac designed for "deep mite removal." While I'd hoped the latter vac was an automatic crawler that could navigate your mattress top, the U50 is a handheld device. Still, no one likes to think about what filters down into their mattress as they sleep -- and there are lots of opinions on how and why to remove those dead skin cells, dust, oils and the mites that arrive to dine on those things.

Robot vacuum cleaners are a dime a dozen these days, but the Narwal T10 tries to offer something almost none of its rivals have. There is a growing number of robots invading our homes, but not in the nefarious way that many sci-fi flicks would have us believe. These robots roam around our rooms, picking up dirt, dust, and hair and sometimes even wiping off stains. Robot vacuum cleaners now come in all shapes and sizes, and it has become a bit more difficult to pick one unless they have some special feature or gimmick. The Narwal T10, the company's first stab at a robot cleaner, advertises one such special skill, and we set it loose on the floor to check if it makes the cut.

Narwal Robotics is a relative newcomer to the household robot market, having been founded in 2016. But you'd never know this was a rookie effort based on the company's hardware. Its first product, the Narwal T10, is a phenomenal robot vac/mop hybrid that delivers several features you won't find anywhere else. But you need to use Narwal's app to control the device, and that experience can be tear-your-hair-out frustrating. As good as the hardware is, no manufacturer should expect its customer to pay $1,199 for its product and then have to wrestle with a half-baked app to use it. This profile shot of the Narwal T10 shows one of its mopping pads in close contact with the floor underneath it.