I wouldn't have expected a company that makes cleaning robots to come up with one of the most genuinely useful new products at CES, but here we are. Ecovacs made its bones in robotic vacuums, but its production window cleaning bot, called the Winbot 7, is a whole lot crazier. I mean, I'm not sure if you've ever cleaned windows, but they're a pain in the ass to do. Now you can have your little window drone do it. Here, watch it in action:As you can hear the rep explain to another dude in the video, the Winbot has a reservoir for cleaning fluid which soaks its large front pad (the bottom one in the photo below), and is then cleared off by a rubber squeegee. The back pad makes sure that you've got the streak-free shine you've always dreamed of. It comes in two version, one which has a sensor for detecting frameless windows.The robot holds on to windows with its central vaccuum unit, and has little rubber tracks to move around. Ecovacs says the bot will first map the boundaries of a window before designing a cleaning plan, so it's not totally random.The bot seemed to work pretty well in the demo, although it wasn't doing wet passes, and I wonder how well it's able to stick and move when it's dealing with whatever cleaning fluid the squeegee misses. Also, let's be honest, the thing isn't very fast, and it does have a tethered cord, which may or may not make it awkward for you to use in certain circumstances. It does come with a backup battery, so that it can drive down to the bottom of a window and plop off onto the floor in the case of a power outage, and also comes with a suction tether that acts like a climbing rope to save the bot in case of a fall. It's supposed to cost around $399 upon release this spring, which is more than I can afford to spend on any sort of cleaning bot. Cost aside, this remains one of those gadgets that makes you think "Hey, the future is sorta here."@derektmead
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