Fancy a self-cleaning house? Let a high-end robot step in

Giving time-poor Australians back hours in their day, robot vacuums, window cleaners, lawn mowers and pool cleaners are laying the foundation for self-maintaining homes.

As modern life places greater demands on our time, Australians are still spending about four to five hours each day on unpaid domestic labour, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey.

That adds up to more than 30 days a year spent mopping, wiping, vacuuming and maintaining the home, so it’s no wonder many of us feel so pressed for time.

Working in unison

A growing range of home robots is designed to ease that burden, but consumers are still looking for the simplest and most effective way to tackle a specific task in the home, says David Qian, CEO of global home robotics specialist ECOVACS.

“Modern consumers aren’t necessarily thinking about just one robot,” Qian says. “They are after a solution in which all these specialised robots make different parts of home maintenance easier. Now, the cumulative time saving can become very meaningful.”

Named the global No.1 home robotics brand in a newly released research report by Forbes China¹, ECOVACS’ robots now serve more than 38 million households across nearly 180 markets worldwide.

Its robotic portfolio extends from DEEBOT floor-cleaning robots to WINBOT window cleaners, GOAT lawn mowers and ULTRAMARINE pool cleaners.

ECOVACS showcased its latest robotic innovations at the recent 2026 Innovation For All (IFA) Berlin technology show, where the focus was on making home robotics more intelligent and autonomous. Such innovations included combining AI with Dual-LiDAR sensors to help them better understand their environment.

“Our focus is not innovation simply for the sake of saying we have a new technology,” Qian says. “We ask a much more practical question: does this technology make the product better, easier to use and give people meaningful time back?”

“We measure success by whether customers are willing to bring these robots into their homes and whether those robots genuinely improve their lives.”

Innovating to make life easier

As robot vacuums improve identifying what they find on the floor, they can clean more precisely with less need for human intervention. The DEEBOT X12S OmniCyclone also features the OZMO ROLLER 3.0 with continuous self-washing to prevent dirt from spreading.

Meanwhile, the WINBOT W3 OMNI features Vortex Wash pad-cleaning technology as part of the focus on automating window cleaning and making maintenance easier.

When it comes to robotic lawn care, one of the key challenges is delivering a complete result, including edges and difficult-to-reach areas. The GOAT T Series features HoloScope 360 Dual-LiDAR Navigation and TruEdge Trimmer for tackling borders, to ensure the robot can do the whole job.

Building on its expertise across floor, window and lawn care, ECOVACS is extending its robotics range to pool cleaning. Also showcased at the IFA Berlin, the ULTRAMARINE L1 PRO is designed to take the time and effort out of pool care, autonomously navigating and cleaning different pool environments with minimal user intervention.

“We ask ourselves: what other repetitive jobs around the home can robotics take care of? Pool cleaning is a very natural extension of that thinking,” says Qian. “It is also a technically interesting environment.”

“A pool robot needs to navigate, detect debris and operate reliably in conditions that are completely different from a living room or garden. It gives us another opportunity to apply our experience in sensing, intelligence, motors and autonomous robotics to a task people would rather spend less time doing.”

Listening to locals

ECOVACS’ user-first innovation focuses on the “Created for Ease” philosophy, addressing genuine everyday household chores through in-home research. This includes a local-for-local strategy of listening closely to customers, to ensure smart robots are tailored to the unique needs of Australian homes.

Robotics should make people’s lives easier, Qian says, not more complicated. In the shift toward self-maintaining homes, the goal is to make robots more capable and autonomous so they can quietly get on with doing the job in the background.

“What I hear consistently from our customers is that time is the real value,” he says.

“Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so if a robot can take care of a repetitive household task and return some of that time to you, then the benefit becomes very tangible.”

Indeed, today’s home robotics are designed to deliver something far more valuable than a clean floor or manicured lawn: time. With an ecosystem ready to tackle repetitive chores in the background, Australians can now step back and put housework into the hands of smart technology.

For more information, visit ecovacs.com/au.

¹The “No. 1 Brand in Global Home Robotics” designation is based on the 2026 Forbes China Survey of Home Robotics Companies, published by Forbes China in September 2026. Authored by the Forbes China Research Team, the report evaluated brands across seven major dimensions: product portfolio, technology & R&D, supply chain capability, global expansion, market performance, profit balance, and data transparency. ECOVACS Robotics ranked first with a score of 8.56 out of 10, based on data covering the full year of 2025.