I'm equal parts impressed and intimidated by this new robovac's vending machine-style mopping setup

• Dreame Matrix10 Ultra can swap between three different mop pads
• Picks the style best suited to the task or room it's cleaning
• Also has three cleaning solutions, including one for wood and one for pet odors

Robot vacuum mopping tech is getting ever more advanced, but Dreame's new bot has an especially extensive mopping setup. The Matrix10 Ultra comes with a whole range of cleaning kit, and cherry-picks the right tools for the specific task at hand.

I had a chance to check it out in person yesterday, and I'm equal parts impressed and intimidated. As far as I'm aware, it's the only robot vacuum to offer this kind of setup, and in a market that's filled with copycat bots, that's unusual. If you have lots of hard floor and need something that can offer customized cleaning, this could be the best robot vacuum for you.

First up, there are three different mop pad options. This bot uses the popular dual spinning disc style setup, but the pads themselves are designed to suit different scenarios.

There's a pad with rough nylon bristle strips amongst the softer loops, designed for tackling grease or heavy stains. This would be well suited to cleaning the kitchen, for example. There's also a pad with a sponge layer inside to boost absorbency. This one is a great choice for bathrooms, where there might be excess water that needs mopping away.

Finally, there's the standard option, which Dreame says has some kind of thermal properties that enable it to "maintain a consistent temperature for enhanced cleaning". I'm not entirely sure what this means, which is why I'm quoting the press release at you.

A number of Dreame's robot vacuums have magnetic pads that can be picked up for mopping, and then dropped off in the dock when they're not needed, so you don't have to worry about damp pads coming into contact with your carpets. The Matrix10 Ultra uses the same setup, but the mechanism by which it swaps its mops is especially cool.

The pairs of pads are stacked up against the inside of the door of the dock. A kind of mop trolley, on roller tracks, picks the correct pads up, then whizzes down a ramp, slides into the space where the bot will dock, and drops off the pads into the base, ready to attach to the underside of the robot vacuum.

Scrubbing solutions

Multiple pads aren't the extent of the Matrix10's mop tricks. It also comes with three different floor cleaning solutions for different kinds of messes: a general one, plus a specialist one for pet odors, and another for wooden floors.

Again, you can specify the solution to be used in each room. The solutions are all housed in the dock, and accessed via a side door. I wasn't able to take a look, though, because the bot apparently needs to be charged up in order to access this compartment (odd), and the display model was not.

The slight down-side to having a whole utility room's worth of cleaning kit in a robovac dock is that said dock does end up being rather bulky, but that's the way things seem to be going for modern robot vacuums. If you have a home with lots of hard floors and need something to tackle different kinds of messes – or just prefer to keep things ultra-hygienic by keeping your bathroom cleaning kit completely separate from your kitchen cleaning kit – the Matrix10 Ultra looks like a nifty solution.

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