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Concept specification · three projects
Infinity Cats
Three things every cat house fights forever — fur, the litter box, a cat that won't listen — and the fix for each
1 · The fur
2 · The box
3 · The talking
What this is
A cat house loses three battles every day. The fur: rollers and brushes move hair around, and the cat puts it back. The box: scooping and sweeping twice a day, every day. The talking: telling a cat to get off the table, again. Infinity Cats is three projects on one page. Clean room technology flips the charge of the air, the surfaces and the laundry so hair lets go for good. A cat box sifts, peels, dries and crushes its own waste and is emptied about every three months. And a robot cat, driven from a remote the cats learn is yours, tells them in their own language of ears, tail and posture.
The technical shape
- Packaged
- three projects, one page, three films · one house, one pale tabby, a grey cat · the same room in every film
- The fur
- clean room technology · a cationic spray for surfaces, a negative-ion mist for the air, a charge-reversing rinse and dryer sheets for laundry · hair repelled, not stuck
- The box
- the run-forever box · a sound sensor that cuts the motor while a cat is inside · one backward turn of a belt · two days drying over silica · crushed to dust in a kitchen bag
- The talking
- a calico robot cat on hidden wheels · ear and tail servos, a speaker, a camera · driven from a bright remote, so the cats learn the robot is you
- Hands on
- fur: no rollers, no brushes · box: about once every three months, two minutes · talking: no shouting, she never gets up
- Price targets
- fur kit about $99 · box $179.99, against the $799 self-cleaning boxes · robot built from hobby parts
- Stage
- concept specification · CB's design docs, the box's provisional-patent claims and panel layout, the robot's parts list drafted
The deep end · full technical outline
Outline v2 · expanding
1 · The fur · clean room technology
Why rollers lose
Cat hair carries a static charge that glues it to fabric and floats it in the air like a parachute. A roller lifts a stripe, a brush throws the rest into the air, and the air lays it back down on everything — and the cat sheds more while you work. Sweeping up a particle once it has stuck is the battle cleanrooms decided long ago not to fight.
Borrowed from the chip fab
Semiconductor cleanrooms and data centres keep dust off their machines in three layers: ionisers ground the air so particles drop, a cationic antistatic coating on every surface reverses its charge so particles are pushed off, and the floor is cleaned of what lands. Competition cat groomers use the same chemistry on a live coat. Infinity Cats scales that down to a living room.
1 · Surfaces
A heavy-duty cationic spray — quaternary ammonium compounds — is misted onto dry sofas, chairs, rugs and curtains. It changes the fabric's surface charge to positive, the same as the hair, so shed hair cannot weave into the fibres. It sits loose on top, held off the surface, and comes away in one pass. A cationic floor polish does the same for wood and baseboards.
2 · Air
Plug-in negative ionisers, one per main room, change the charge of the air. Floating hair clumps and drops to the floor instead of drifting for hours, and a robot vacuum on a schedule takes it away — no longer wrapping charged, interwoven hair around its brush, because nothing is gripping the floor.
3 · Laundry
A charge-reversing rinse in the wash and two sheets per load in the dryer leave a positively charged layer bonded to the fibres; it lasts three to five wearings. The first load lifts the deep, ground-in layer. A heavy-duty keratin dissolver at 90 °C clears the worst garments on day one.
Together, not one by one
Each measure alone leaves a gap; run together they close each other's. The air and surfaces are cleared by the first cycle, so there is far less hair to land on the treated clothes; by the second, stray hair sits loose instead of embedding; by the third, the house settles at its clean baseline while the cats go on shedding.
What it costs
A thirty-day start — four ionisers, the spray, the rinse and the sheets — comes to about $105–130 bought separately, with most of the spray and sheets left for the months after. Packaged as one kit, the target price is $99: less than the lifetime of rollers and refills.
2 · The box · the run-forever box
The work it replaces
Scoop, shake, bag, twice a day, every day, with hands on the box each time — and the cat back in digging before the bag is tied. Then the sweeping, which gets some of the litter, while the cat walks the rest through the house. The self-cleaning boxes that fix this cost $799; the cheap ones rake, jam and smell.
A sensor, then a wait
A sealed ultrasonic sensor in the ceiling of the hood watches the bed. While a cat is inside, the motor has no power at all — the belt cannot move. When the cat leaves, the box waits ten minutes so the clump can set before anything turns.
One turn of the belt
A wide mesh belt carries a two-inch bed of litter. It runs backward one full turn, about 45 seconds. An angled grate at the front lets the loose litter fall back while the clump rides over it; at the tight rear bend the belt peels the clump off and drops it down a chute. On the return run the belt picks up a fresh coat of baking soda from a trough, and at the front a small gravity hopper and a leveling blade lay a fresh, even bed.
Dried, not blown
There is no fan to push the smell around. The clump spends a day on one tray and a day on a second, both over silica crystals that pull the moisture out, until it is bone dry. Two steel rollers then crush it to a fine dust.
Every three months
The dust packs flat into an ordinary 13-gallon kitchen bag in a drawer at the front — 250 to 300 loads to a bag. About every three months the drawer slides out, the bag is lifted and tied, a fresh one goes in, and the hopper is topped up. Two minutes; in between, nobody touches it.
Built to run forever
The panels are half-inch marine-grade HDPE, routed and bolted, not snapped together. One geared motor drives the belt through a large rear gear; the sensor is potted against dust and water. The provisional-patent claims cover the stationary vertical layout: high-release conveyor, then tiers of passive dehydration, then crushing.
The price
The target is $179.99 — about the price of the cheapest automatic boxes, for the job the $799 ones do, and a buyer will pay a little more for a box that never fails.
3 · The talking · a cat that speaks cat
Why they don't listen
"Get off of there." "Stop biting that." A cat does not hear words, and a person shouting across the room is just noise. Cats talk to each other with ears, tail and posture and a few sounds. The robot says the same things in that language, at their height, for you.
Not a pet — a proxy
Robot pets are built to mimic a cat for people. This one exists to speak to cats on your behalf. We haven't found anyone who has done that: products that talk to a cat use a human voice through a speaker, and the research on cats' visual signals has not been put into a robot.
The robot
A calico about the size of a small adult cat, eight to ten inches at the shoulder, on a two-wheel chassis hidden under its fur, so there are no legs to spook anyone. Two servos move the ears from forward to airplane to flat; two more drive a gimbal at the base of a spring-steel tail. A speaker sits in the mouth, glass eyes, and a camera with Wi-Fi in the bridge of the nose.
An extension of you
The remote is bright and chunky and used only in plain sight. For weeks it is always the same: your hand on a button, then the robot speaks. The cats learn it — at first they look to you, then to the robot sooner, then only at the robot. The robot becomes you, at their height. This is the design idea, built on ordinary association; we will test it.
What it says
A · Halt: a short hiss, ears flat, the tail stiff for two seconds — the cat stops what it is doing. B · Hello: tail up in a hook and a trill, the friendly greeting, at the door. C · This is taken: ears forward and twitching, the tail low and thrashing — a claim on a spot, so the cat leaves the table on its own. And the all-clear: tail up and quivering, a soft trill.
When you're away
From work, the robot's camera shows the house on a phone, and the same buttons work from anywhere. A cat waiting at the window gets the all-clear in a language it trusts — which is meant to ease separation anxiety.
Built from hobby parts
A microcontroller with Wi-Fi and a camera, four hobby servos, a two-wheel smart-car chassis with its motor driver, a small amplifier and speaker, and a battery pack, under a soft fur shell — most of it off the shelf.
Related in the lab
- Wash Bot →
- Shares autonomy — machines that carry a job from start to finish without a hand on them.
- 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 →