Developing robots that can contribute to cleaning could have a significant impact on the lives of many. Cleaning wet liquid spills is a particularly challenging task for a robotic system, and has several high impact applications. This is a hard task to physically model due to the complex interactions between cleaning materials and the surface. As such, to the authors’ knowledge there has been no prior work in this area. A new method for finding optimal control parameters for the cleaning of liquid spills is required by developing a robotic system which iteratively learns to clean through physical experimentation. The robot creates a liquid spill, cleans and assesses performance and uses Bayesian optimization to find the optimal control parameters for a given size of liquid spill. The automation process enabled the experiment to be repeated more than 400 times over 20 h to find the optimal wiping control parameters for many different conditions. We then show that these solutions can be extrapolated for different spill conditions. The optimized control parameters showed reliable and accurate performances, which in some cases, outperformed humans at the same task. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.