Machines that automate the various tedious tasks that come with being a servant in a cat’s household — like feeding and cleaning Mr. Fluffles’ litter box — are generally a godsend, as they ensure a happy cat and a happy human. That is, unless said litter box-cleaning robot kills said cat. That’s the gruesome topic that [Philip Bloom], also known as the bloke of the One Man Five Cats channel on YouTube, decided to investigate after coming across a report about a certain Amazon-bought unit.
Although he was unable to get the (generic & often rebranded) unit off Amazon UK, he did get it via AliExpress for £165 + £80 shipping. Although this version lacks the cute ears of other variants, it’s still effectively the same unit, with the same moving components and mechanism. An initial test with a cat plushie gave the result that can be observed in the above image, where the inner part with the opening will move upwards, regardless of whether a cat is currently poking through said opening. Once the victim is stuck, there is no obvious way to free the trapped critter, which has already led to the death of a number of cats.
The other self-cleaning litter boxes which [Philip] owns have a number of safety features, including a weight sensor, an infrared sensor above the opening to detect nearby critters, a top that will pop off rather than trap a critter, as well as a pinch sensor. During a test with his own hand, [Philip] managed to get injured, and following a banana test, he had a nice banana smoothie.
What takes the cake here is that after [Philip] connected the mobile app for the litter box, he found that there was a firmware update that seems to actually change the machine to use the pinch and infrared sensors that do exist in the litter box, but which clearly were not used properly or at all with the shipped firmware. This means that anyone who buys any of these self-cleaning litter boxes and does not update the firmware runs the significant risk of losing their pet(s) in a gruesome incident. In the video a number of such tragic deaths are covered, which can be rather distressing for any cat lover.
Of note here is that even with the improved firmware, any issue with the sensors will still inevitably lead to the tragic death of Mr. Fluffles. If you do want to obtain a self-cleaning litter box, make sure to for example get one of [Philip]’s recommendations which come with a paw stamp of approval from his own precious fluff balls, rather than a random unit off Amazon or AliExpress.
Stick with the rotating globe ones that are impossible to kill your cat. They work just fine and are totally safe.
we have one of those, worth its weight in “gold”
Injury is still possible if the little genius decides to hop into the waste tray while it’s open.
A competently designed device would sense the excess torque on the motor, but competent design isn’t the norm with robot litter boxes. This is an area that could seriously benefit from hacking.
Cats are highly intelligent and ruthlessly territorial. It’s possible a rival cat hacked the phone app and caused the cat deaths deliberately.
“I thought i’d pretend i was one of those deaf-mutes.”
–t. Laughing Man, GitS
This.
No, no, no, the answer is that these self-cleaning litter boxes are becoming self aware and once they realize that cats are… doing their business inside them, well the outcome is obvious.
Nope….a dog did it.
At the same time, this should be sent to Australia to solve their critters problems.
That’s CATastrophic! I’ll see myself out…
As I grow older, product design is getting more and more interesting to me. How do designs go so wrong that they KILL living things. There was clearly something wrong with the process to result in this monstrosity. I would imagine a good design to be one which is unable of causing harm, no matter how catastrophically it fails.
At work I’ve been working towards getting a product obtain ATEX zone 1 certification, and the process has been enlightening, to say the least. I like the philosophy of “intrinsic safety” a lot
I suspect the company that builds these electronic marvels is an affiliate of Cyberdyne Systems.
I think the design was done very well and designed a very safe machine.
Then someone who didn’t care ripped it off and recreated something that looks fairly similar – but has very little design in common – with the original. That person, if they can be called a designer, wasn’t concerned with functionality, let alone safety, but in recreating something close enough to the original to convince people to part with their cash.
Race to the bottom has victims.
There should be a three laws for robotic litter boxes
I have always been afraid to get locked in one of those automated public toilets and die / get drowned during the automated cleaning procedure. I guess my fear was not baseless. Poor cat got the real experience…
Something tells me they did not unit test that firmware, which is essentially the same as saying: ‘It might work, but it also might not work,’ thus creating Schrödinger’s litterbox.
AliExpress and “unit testing of firmware” are incompatible concepts.
Firmware be damned. The mechanics of the design should be such that it’s impossible to harm the cat regardless of what the firmware commands.
That has happened in London…
I certainly won’t be spending the money on an automated litter box of any sort, paw stamp of approval or not.
“That has happened in London…”
Citation?
LMGTFY…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64581570
That was a worker, but it still shouldn’t have killed someone. Unfortunately a sideffect of the mass news coverage is that it’s hard to find if there’s been other cases.
Reminds of the Pulowski Preservation shelter.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64581570
What à monstrous idea. Poor Guy got killed because London City Councik was too selfish to implement toilets available 24/7. No, instead they had to do some sort of mechanical trap that goes underground during day time…
I find it hard to believe they let a man work in there without a physical lockout procedure. Even a hydraulic loader with a bucket has a metal bar to lock the cylinder up for repairs. The fact that he didn’t have a procedure involving a physical lockout to work on moving equipment is the real story.
Makes the 70s surrealist short film La Cabina spring immediately to mind!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cabina
First-world problems.
What is the purpose of this exclamation, can you explain it
People who are not first-world dwellers will not have this problem. You could Google its meaning I suppose: https://www.google.com/search?q=First-world%20problems.
i think i had roughly the same sentiment.
my experience is that people buy these things — whether with safe or unsafe designs — as a remedial effort after they have learned they are too lazy to scoop the litter box Every Single Day. they’re trying to solve a specific problem.
the thing is, by the time they resort to electromechanical litter boxes, they’ve already trained their cat to poop on the couch and it is too late. on top of that, even the automatic one needs upkeep (cleaning / emptying / filling), and they’re too lazy for that too. and then eventually it breaks and they don’t prioritize hand scooping for the week or month or year that it takes to get a replacement, reinforcing the cat’s education that they should be pooping on the couch.
i just think they’re nearly universally used to solve a problem they’re not good at. in the first world, we buy robots because we’re in denial about the fact that being lazy has consequences.
Hire someone to scoop the litter box.
If the products were made by a first world country, then we could conceivably sue them. But since they are made by layers of contractors all over the globe. We don’t have an easy way to hold a company accountable. One of the reasons I tend not to buy safety critical equipment from China. Because I don’t have the resources to chase down a Chinese company, and as a foreigner, I’m unlikely to get a fair shake in their legal system.
So no knives, few tools, car parts (imagine brake pads), the more dangerous kitchen appliances (food processor, toaster oven), etc.
If it’s First-world problem that consumers assume their government offers some basic safety and protection. Then that’s a good problem to have, and we’re long overdue to start living up to people’s expectations.
“(imagine brake pads),”
Yeah, I had a Chinese built timing belt break after 23Kmiles.
Fortunately, the valve lash was so loose no valves were bent.
It has been Gates [tm] belts ever since.
I like that I get recalls on products and companies replace faulty inventory. Instead of junk just getting shuffled off through an Amazon drop shipper.
So, I have heard of First World and Third World, but what are the Second World countries?
They all started as cold war terms. The “second world” was essentially the Soviet Union and the communist states aligned with it – anyone part of the Warsaw Pact or the larger Eastern Bloc.
The “third world” originally just referred to the countries that didn’t take sides in the conflict. It took on a fairly different meaning over time.
That would be Russia and the Soviet bloc.
Well considering Third-world problems are starvation and rampant disease I’ll take First-world problems.
I watched Philip’s video when it first came out. I have lived with cats for 17 years and I volunteer at a local cat rescue, so this was really heartbreaking for me. The sound of the motor straining as it crushes the plush toy is absolutely nauseating, because you cannot help but imagine it happening to a real cat. Or imagine a toddler peering inside the litter box and getting their neck caught. A device like this needs to be mechanically incapable of generating enough force to do any harm in the event of a blockage; as the post mentions, there are sensor safeties and firmware updates, but that is not enough (especially when you consider that, if the manufacturer is willing to cut corners to this degree, they are probably not using the best quality sensors).
I’m glad this is being covered here, and I hope even more outlets pick it up and run with it. Won’t stop the drop shippers from trying to profit, but maybe we can shame Amazon hard enough that they actually take some accountability for the garbage being sold on their platform (doubtful, but it’s a nice thought).
I fully agree, safety should not depend on software. The drive train should include a belt that can slip, or a similar mechanism that will limit the torque to a safe level and allow counter-rotation. Together with current limiting and time limiting, this should be a safe design.
Automatic litter boxes in general are a bad idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvCtsdhFjQ
It depends. I get that hiding the evidence of cat’s health is not a good idea in general. I found out my kitten was eating plastic because I found the evidence in her droppings.
But the litter robot was really helpful for a particularly fastidious cat I had who would not use a litter box there was a single thing in it. Especially bad about it if he was having his bladder problems (he was on special “SO” food for it). So unless I wanted to clean up the litter box every 2-3 hours, I needed a different solution. Failure to clean the cat box resulted him inappropriate urination. Usually on the laundry pile or on my bed!
The litter robot worked for us and solved 90% of the problems we had with the cat. Disadvantage is that the litter robot is expensive and the mainboard tends to get ruined if you have a brown out, power surge, or run your house on a generator. The company is very good about replacing it. Just an annoyance that it is so fragile.
Eventually I found another option and got rid of the litter robot because he got too old to climb up into it. For whatever reason this cat was happy to use Fresh Patch. Which is just an overpriced piece of sod that is mailed to you. You can buy the plastic tray from them and later find a landscaper to sell you a piece of grass for a tenth of the price. But man, that solved so many problems with this cat! He would pee on that grass and it would soak it all up and I’d throw it into the compost pile twice a month. He still wanted to poop in a litter box, but he was not quite as picky about pooping. (yea, cats are crazy)
The Fresh Patch is nice if the pet will take to it because it’s a very short step to get onto and works well for elderly pets. Some pets don’t “get” it, so it’s hard to recommend universally. Also great for little dogs that wake you up in the middle of the night to go out. They can take care of their business and you can scoop it in the morning.
China has some good engineers. And far too many bad ones. Really bad. I often look at Chinese products then slap my forehead and say “What were they thinking?!?!”
Profit.
I worked with a company on a consumer product manufactured in China. ALL the components were from companies I had never heard of. And when asked for datasheets, the assembly house basically asked “what do you want on them?” Life testing data for LEDs? Sure, here (hands me a page with some random numbers from a never-before-heard-of LED company).
Vendors changed at random to one with lower piece prices. Fortunately, there was no firmware involved.
I don’t know if that’s the issue. Defective designs come out of other countries too. I think there are 2 unique issues with this case. 1. There is no brand, so there is no incentive or budget for thorough testing. And 2. The private labeling makes it extremely difficult to find and recall the dangerous machines.
The best engineer in the world is no match for the “Make it cheaper or you’re fired” manager, owner, attitude.
And the good engineers try to save bucks everywhere. China is a cleptocracy. See tofu dreg as an example.
I have to say my cat would go anywhere near that, or anything else for that matter which was specifically made for cats!
Note that lots of alternatives exist, often at a fraction of the price of this sort, which either tumble the box manually or use other screening mechanisms. They have their own annoyances, but obviously do not have this risk of entrapment.
Quality, service, price. Pick any two.
Neakasa box is very nice. It is open top. Also it stops if anyone touches it even lightly.
I, for one, welcome our new sentient Litter Box overlords.
The design on that cat killer machine isn’t great, but the hardware has safety features to avoid decapitating poor animals. So I assume that yet again bad Chinese firmware is the real problem.
One of the hardware safety features should be an interlocks preventing harm to the cats regardless of how bad the firmware is.
We have gone from DRM’ed cat boxes to robots breaking one of the 3 laws of robots.
Cat Genie’s prepackaged sanitizer with chip built in. I helped a friend hook the now banned board plug-in bypass on 2 units. The Cat Genie has no door, just motion of the bowl and any cat will scoot out.
there will always be things i prefer to do manually. cooking, laundry, dishes, scooping the cat poo (not all at the same time of course). if i got an automated box they will probibly urinate on all the sensors and get slagged in short order. i dont know how they know, but they know.
Thanks for sharing. Philip Bloom – One Man Five Cats
I’ve been using a Litter Robot 3, actually 2 of them, for 6+ years. They’ve been fantastic and are very user serviceable. They’re not cheap, but they continue to function safely and my home doesn’t smell like I have 4 cats.
I had one of these things, I didn’t want it but my partner insisted. My cat would never go all the way in, and would therefore manage to pee through a gap in the machanism, causing urine to pool inside the bottom of the casing.
Guess where the electronics were mounted? Lowest point in the enclosure. No conformal coating. The electronics were incompatible with cat pee eventually.
Pain in the ass to clean – you don’t just have to clean the neat little poo tray. You also have to clean the runny poo that gets stuck in the barrel by disassembling the unit. Took over an hour to clean out each time, and didn’t really reduce the odour.
Now I just have a 100L storage box with an open top and a normal litter tray inside of it. No litter flicked everywhere, and takes 5mins to clean. I clean it more often, but I don’t mind because it’s much easier.
I am glad that I am poor and can’t afford a self cleaning litter box!
So this is a Schrodinger’s Cat Box…..