Litter Box Robot: From Daily Scooping to ABB Cobots

How the litter box robot grew from sand trays, Kitty Litter in 1947 and clumping litter in 1984 to app connected units, and where ABB robots could build them.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/12/20265 min read

Few household chores are as unloved as scooping the cat's tray, and the litter box robot is one of the few home robots built for a single dirty job. This post looks at how cat owners managed before litter existed, how clay and then clumping litter changed the work, and how a Ford engineer's rotating globe turned it into a machine. It then covers today's app connected units and the factory side of the business, where ABB cobots and palletizers could plausibly help build the robots and pack the litter they run on.

White and orange kitten digging in a green plastic tray of grey litter

A calico kitten digging in a plastic litter box. Photo: MiNe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How cat owners managed before the litter box robot

For a long time indoor cats used boxes of sand, and owners simply dumped and refilled them. In Michigan in 1947, Edward Lowe gave a neighbour some absorbent clay for her cat's box. It worked so well that he began selling it in bags as Kitty Litter. Clay soaked up urine and smell far better than sand, which made it practical to keep a cat indoors full time. The owner still had a daily job, though: lifting out the wet patches and solids and topping up the box.

Grey plastic tray filled with clean grey clay litter granules

Fresh clay cat litter in an open litter box. Photo: CambridgeBayWeather / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The next step came from chemistry. Calcium bentonite clumping litters were made in the UK in the 1950s, and in 1984 the American biochemist Thomas Nelson developed clumping bentonite litter. Clumping litter binds urine into firm lumps that lift out with a slotted scoop, so the rest of the box stays clean for longer. That made the daily chore quicker, and it also made automation possible. A machine only has to separate solid clumps from loose granules, which is far easier than handling wet, soaked sand.

Long haired tabby and white cat crouching in a white litter tray on a wooden floor

A cat using an open litter box that will need scooping by hand. Photo: Ocdp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first automatic litter box patents appeared in the early 1990s. Those designs used motorised rakes, which tended to struggle with clumping litter. In 1999 Brad Baxter, a mechanical engineer who had joined Ford in 1989, inherited two cats and started on a different idea: a globe that rotates and lets gravity sift the clean litter through a screen. He licensed related technology from the inventor Don Reitz and built the first unit himself in metro Detroit. The first Litter-Robot sold at a trade show in April 2000, and Baxter founded Automated Pet Care Products, known as AutoPets, the same year. Early production was put together by hand in a former automotive building in Pontiac, Michigan, and Litter-Robot 2 followed in 2005.

Person opening the drawer under a beige globe shaped automatic litter box

The waste drawer pulled out of a Litter-Robot 2 self-cleaning litter box. Photo: bestselfcleaninglitterbox.com / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Self-cleaning litter boxes and app-connected units today

A modern self-cleaning litter box waits until the cat leaves, then rotates, rakes or washes. In the Litter-Robot, clean litter passes through a screen while clumps drop into a drawer below. Plumbed units go further: they connect to a cold water tap and a laundry drain, wash the granules, flush the waste away and dry the litter with a heated fan. Litter-Robot 3 arrived in 2015, the app connected Litter-Robot 3 Connect in 2017, Litter-Robot 4 in 2022, and Litter-Robot 5 and 5 Pro in 2025.

Orange cat sitting in the round bowl of a white automatic litter box by a wall

A cat in a fully plumbed self-cleaning litter box that washes and dries its granules. Photo: Ugrashak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In September 2026 The Wall Street Journal reviewed the Whisker Litter-Robot 5 Pro, which cleans automatically and tracks the cat's health. AutoPets renamed itself Whisker in 2021, and on 1 October 2026 the company relaunched its GreatLitter as a standalone premium litter brand called Lit. Oddly for a robot company, Whisker's own history says its units are assembled by hand. That work happens in Juneau, Wisconsin, in a facility that grew from 30,000 to 250,000 square feet with an investment of more than 15 million dollars. Some components are sourced abroad, so not every part is made in the United States.

Beige hooded plastic litter box with a flap door on a wooden floor

A covered plastic litter box, still emptied by hand in most homes. Photo: FASTILY / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no ABB robot in litter box production, so what follows are possible fits. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can work beside people on an assembly bench, holding housings or driving screws while workers handle wiring and final checks. The plastic globes and bases come out of injection moulding machines, and ABB arms such as the IRB 1600 already unload moulding machines in other plants. Litter is heavy and sold in bags and jugs, the kind of load ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers stack on many packaging lines.

White and grey ABB cobot arm holding a cylinder over a wooden work table

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

What comes next for litter box robots

At home, boxes are starting to collect data as well as clumps. The WSJ review of the Litter-Robot 5 Pro already treats health tracking as a selling point. Changes in how often a cat uses the box can be an early sign of illness, so it is easy to imagine a vet looking at that log one day. Some problems are still unsolved. Shy or elderly cats may refuse a moving machine, and a sensor fault that traps or startles a cat is a safety issue no maker can ignore.

White ABB robot arm inside a glass guarded cell next to a plastic moulding machine

The vision-guided ABB IRB 1600 in Limac FormPlast's moulding cell in Sweden. Photo: ABB

In factories, more demand means more units to assemble, test and pack. Hand assembly suits a company that changes its product every few years, because people adapt to a new model faster than a fixed machine does. Cobots sit somewhere in between. They can take over repetitive steps such as driving screws, testing switches or packing boxes, and they can be moved to a new task when the next model arrives. Programs for cells like these are often built and checked first in RobotStudio.

White ABB robot arm stacking cardboard boxes onto a pallet next to a conveyor

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Cost holds things back on both sides. A premium litter box robot already costs several times as much as a plastic tray, and a small manufacturer has to weigh each robot cell against hiring more people. Skills are the other limit. Assembly staff need training before they can set up cobots, which is why tools for programming robots without code matter so much in smaller plants. For more on robots around animals, see our post on pet care and pet food.

Woman guiding the end of a white ABB cobot arm with her hands at a table

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

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