Ecovacs' newest home robot is not a vacuum — it hangs off a window by 800 newtons of suction

The most recent machine from Ecovacs, one of the largest Chinese makers of cleaning robots, does not touch the floor at all. The WINBOT W2S PRO OMNI, on sale since 10 August 2026 at a list price of USD 599.99, is a window-cleaning robot: a fan presses it against the glass with more than 800 N of hold, an internal battery runs it for 110 minutes without a mains cord, and three nozzles lay down an atomised film of water that a wiping pad then takes off. That is worth noticing because of what it says about the category rather than about this one product. Ecovacs now sells four separate lines of home robot — floor (DEEBOT), glass (WINBOT), lawn (GOAT) and pool (ULTRAMARINE) — and the newest launch belongs to none of the first. Twenty years after the robot vacuum became a mass-market appliance, "home robot" has stopped being a synonym for it. The four lines are not variations on one machine. Each solves the hardest problem in its own environment differently, and the differences are structural. Indoors the DEEBOT navigates by camera and laser SLAM against furniture. In the garden the GOAT A3000 LiDAR replaces both the buried boundary wire and the RTK satellite mast with two lidars and a camera, precisely because tree cover and roof overhangs break satellite positioning. In the pool, robots run on sonar and gyroscopes because neither light nor radio behaves usefully under water. And on glass there is no navigation problem worth the name — the surface is flat and empty — but there is a falling problem, so the engineering budget goes into a 5 kg counterweight station, a 5.5 m safety rope rated at 1,000 N, and a robot that stays stuck to the pane for over half an hour after the battery runs low. One detail undercuts the tidy picture. Ecovacs' global site currently advertises a WINBOT W3 OMNI on its home page, and the product page behind that banner returns a 404; the model does not appear in the company's own product sitemap either. The global page for the W2S PRO OMNI, meanwhile, still carries the text of the earlier W2S OMNI, with an 80 ml tank and 68 dB where the US page lists 120 ml and 66 dB. Buyers comparing figures across a manufacturer's own regional sites are, for now, comparing two different machines. Both new profiles — the window robot and the lawn mower — have been added to the wujec.ai catalogue, which until today described robot vacuums and pool cleaners but not a single machine for glass or grass.