The Weekender: Robots, Robots Everywhere (Even at the Litter Box)

Blame the elves. They saw generative artificial intelligence (AI) coming for their jobs and outsourced Christmas to robots. This holiday season, the digital economy’s strangest edges have gone gloriously mainstream: your drink is mixed by a bot, your window is squeegeed by a suction-climbing square, and your cat’s litter is analyzed like a lab sample. If it moves, beeps, cleans, scoots, mows, mixes or meows: there’s a robot for that.

Why this is suddenly everywhere

Robotics quietly jumped the fence from cute gizmos and warehouse pickers into home life because AI now gives machines better eyes, ears and timing. Vision models let mowers find grass without wires; sensor fusion keeps window bots from leaping off the glass; LLM-powered “companions” follow faces and voices; and even grills “learn” how you like your ribeye. The result? A Black Friday/Cyber Monday gift list that reads like a Fast Company fever dream and a snapshot of how automation is commercializing at the edges. Case in point: Whisker just launched a new LitterRobot with AI cat facial recognition and waste monitoring. Yes, for your cat. Welcome to 2025.

The Fringe Robotics Gift Guide: 10 Bots Invading Home, Yard and Pet Life

The AI Litter Box That Knows Whiskers From Whiskers
Whisker’s LitterRobot 5 Pro adds cameras and on-device AI to tell which cat is doing what, feeding health insights into the app. If that’s a step too far, the still-current LitterRobot 4 remains the benchmark for quiet, self-cleaning convenience. Poop data is officially a product category now.

Robot Dog, No Walk Required
The Unitree Go2 is the consumer-grade quadruped that turned robot dogs from YouTube novelty into programmable pets and dev kits. It ships with Unitree’s 4D LiDAR for 360° perception and learned “gaits” like obstacle climbing — equal parts STEM toy and living room conversation starter.

Your New (Algorithmic) Bartender
Barsys 360 is an app-controlled cocktail robot that meters pours and walks you through recipes from a phone. You supply spirits and mixers; Barsys does the precision. Ideal for hosts who want probar consistency without memorizing 1,000 ratios.

A Window-Clinging Cleaner
The ECOVACS Winbot W1 Pro treats panes like floors, auto-spraying and plotting back-and-forth paths that avoid edges — even on frameless glass. If you’ve ever squeegeed a second-story window in a stiff breeze, you already know why this is a “shut up and take my money” category.

Pool Robot = Saturdays Back
Maytronics’ Dolphin Nautilus CC Plus (WiFi) scrubs floors and walls and lets you schedule cycles in the MyDolphin app. If “drag the hose around” was the old pool routine, this is the set-and-forget upgrade.

AI That Mows Without Wires
Worx’s Landroid Vision uses a camera and on-device AI to identify grass — no boundary wire, no yard mapping. Drop it on the lawn, it finds the green, and quietly gets to work. In other words: robotic mowing for people who hate setup.

A 10Minute Robot Manicure
Clockwork runs autonomous nail-painting kiosks in offices, airports and retail locations. You prep; the robot paints in minutes using 3D/AI guidance, with a guided touchscreen flow and live support if you flinch. File it under: “I have a flight in 40 minutes.”

The Companion Petbot
Loona is an animated, wheels-and-eyes home companion that follows, plays games, recognizes people and can patrol when you’re away. It’s more Pixar than Roomba — an easy on-ramp to “living” AI for families (and a surprisingly good decoy for kids who want a real puppy).

The 90Second Steak Robot
SeerGrills Perfecta is a vertical, glass-front grill that blasts both sides of your food with searing heat while software dials doneness. Media demos rave about its speed; the company says steak in about 90 seconds, burgers similarly fast. Backyard theater meets machine learning.

A Suitcase That Follows You
Airports are the ultimate tech catwalk, and the Airwheel SR5 brings the flex: a carryon that uses sensors to trail you hands-free, with obstacle avoidance and anti-lost features. Is it practical? Debatable. Is it peak traveltech peacocking? Absolutely.

What it means for the digital economy

These products aren’t just toys. They’re distribution experiments for embodied AI: computer vision in the yard, autonomy on glass, perception in kitchens and living rooms. Subscription layers (pet health data, premium recipes, consumables) convert one-off gadgets into recurring revenue. And because robots are finally doing obvious, unsexy jobs — scooping, scrubbing, mowing — they slot into household budgets alongside vacuums and espresso machines.

This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the fringe is the funnel. The weirdest robots are showing us where mainstream automation is headed: quiet, useful, often funny — and very much for sale.