Robotics · Consumer
Shovel-ready design
Wash Bot
Set it on top. Walk away.
What this is
A cordless, self-contained robot that washes a car the way a window bot washes glass — by clinging to it. Four articulated pad quadrants hinge around a central spine to conform to compound curves; a continuous adhesion skirt holds vacuum across panel breaks; the same litre of water cycles clean → filter → clean. The owner’s entire workflow is the product’s name. About 3.5 kg and four hours on a charge, it fits nearly every car on American roads.
The technical shape
- Architecture
- four drive/cleaning pads · articulated ±15° around a central service spine
- Adhesion
- dual-lip skirt + micro-vacuum — seal survives panel breaks and handles
- Water
- closed loop, ~0.5 L reservoir — clean, filter, re-clean
- Budget
- ~3.5 kg · 60 Wh ≈ 4 h runtime · $999 retail at production scale
- Coverage
- >99% of the U.S. fleet — soft-top convertibles are the exception
The deep end · full technical outline
Outline v2 · expanding
Bill of materials — highlights
4× drive/cleaning pad assemblies (direct-drive brushless + planetary gearbox + rotating bristle disc + voice-coil bristle-lift; ~300 g and ~1.5 W average each) · articulated carbon-fibre chassis with spring-loaded pivots and bellows covers · central rigid-flex service spine (power/CAN bus, water rail, slurry return, adhesion duct) · centrifugal vacuum with two-stage filtration · 500 mL reservoir + peristaltic misting pump · 14.4 V / 4.2 Ah (60 Wh) flat pack · edge-drop sensors under each leading edge. Total ~3.5 kg.
Power & runtime
Peak draw ~35 W (vacuum 20 + drive 6 + pumps 7 + electronics 2); average cleaning power ~15 W with the vacuum throttled and intermittent misting. 60 Wh ÷ 15 W ≈ 4 hours — full exterior coverage with margin.
The closed water loop
Clean water runs a single linear manifold down the spine with one short drop per pad; slurry returns through a central manifold into the filter; the filtered return to the reservoir is a straight two-point line. The same litre is used, cleaned, and used again — the machine cleans the water it cleans with.
Articulation & adhesion
±15° tilt between quadrants around the spine — enough to conform to a sedan’s compound curves, which is why the shield→hood crossing in the film bends the hinge instead of breaking the physics. A continuous dual-lip silicone skirt with a capillary foam wiper holds vacuum across panel breaks (~2 kPa skirt vacuum ≈ 60 N of attachment); bristle-lift raises the whole machine over hardware like door handles (+14 mm clearance).
Packaging: quadrants and spine
FL battery, FR vacuum and filter, RL reservoir and pump, RR controller — each quadrant lands at ~0.8–0.9 kg wet, so the machine balances by allocation, not ballast. The spine is a structural truss that carries every service: four wires (power pair + CAN pair) with local motor drivers per pad, the water rail co-extruded with the power lines into a single fluid+power umbilical, and the slurry manifold at center so no pad starves. Dead volume in the entire loop is under 20 mL of the 500 mL reservoir.
Proof without a prototype
A multi-fidelity simulation suite carries the burden a $25k prototype would: engine-level demo for the whole-machine story, and targeted multiphysics for the claims that earn skepticism — thin-film vacuum adhesion on textured cladding (2 kPa ΔP held on an 80-grit-equivalent panel under a 0.2 mL/cm² water film), multiphase slurry recovery above 95%, flexible bristle tufts deforming over a door mirror without seal loss, and a full-cycle energy log that drains the battery from 100% to 15% across one complete clean — the power budget, proven end to end.
Market and price
Water-film adhesion is the breakthrough that unlocked textured plastic — the entire SUV and crossover segment — taking addressable coverage above 99% of the U.S. passenger fleet; the principled exception is the soft-top convertible, whose porous roof cannot hold vacuum. At moderate scale (~50k units/yr): BOM ≈ $195, factory cost ≈ $222, supported retail $999 — under the annual cost of professional detailing it replaces. Those dollar figures are the feasibility pass’s best-guess forecasts, dated the day the pass ran — the design is the commitment, not the price. The numbers move as suppliers and volumes do, and the pass that produced them can always be re-run.
Related in the lab
- Autonomous Mowers →
- Shares autonomy — machines that carry a job from start to finish without a hand on them.
Built at this bench
The machine, the instrument, the film that explains it — all designed and built in-house. The same bench works for hire.
Services →