WYBOT Pushes Robotic Pool Cleaning Toward Greater Autonomy

Robotic pool cleaners have become one of the fastest-moving equipment categories in the pool industry. Cordless operation, smarter navigation, app connectivity and increasingly autonomous cleaning have changed what pool owners expect from these machines—and created an increasingly crowded field of manufacturers looking for their attention.

WYBOT may appear to be one of the newer names competing for a piece of that market. The company behind the brand, however, is anything but new to robotic pool cleaning.

“We’ve actually been around for 20-plus years manufacturing robotic pool cleaners,” said Nathaniel Michaelis, General Manager and Vice President of the Americas for WYBOT. “About three years ago, we were innovating on behalf of other brands and we said, ‘Hey, why aren’t we doing this for ourselves?’”

That decision marked an important change in strategy. Rather than continuing to put its newest engineering behind other brands, the company began concentrating those innovations under WYBOT. Michaelis said the company continues to manufacture for some well-known brands in the pool industry, but its latest technology is now being developed for its own product lineup.

That history provides some useful context in a category where new robotic cleaner brands seem to appear almost overnight. WYBOT is a relatively young consumer-facing brand backed by considerably older manufacturing and engineering experience.

The bigger question is how the company intends to distinguish itself in an increasingly competitive market.

Where WYBOT Achieves Differentiation

Michaelis points to what WYBOT calls “meaningful innovation”—features designed to eliminate an actual step in pool maintenance rather than simply adding another feature or gimmick.

“I think the perfect example there is our newest launch, the WYBOT S3, which is the first self-emptying robotic pool cleaner,” Michaelis said. “So it’ll actually go out, clean your pool, come back, dock itself in the water, and empty all the debris that it just picked up.”

For Michaelis, that is representative of WYBOT’s larger philosophy.

“That tells the story of who we are and how we’re differentiating ourselves,” he said, describing an approach centered on meaningful innovation that improves the overall pool ownership experience.

That philosophy becomes easier to understand when looking at WYBOT’s two principal product families, the C Series and S Series.

While there is some crossover in technology, they occupy distinctly different positions in the lineup.

“The C Series is our core,” Michaelis explained. “C stands for core. And the C Series is where we try to bring the most meaningful innovation at the most accessible price points.”

In practical terms, the C Series is designed around the everyday residential pool owner. These are self-contained, battery-powered robotic cleaners intended to provide many of the capabilities consumers increasingly expect from cordless cleaners without moving into the price and feature territory of WYBOT’s flagship models.

That includes technology such as AI Vision, which Michaelis said allows the cleaner to identify and prioritize dirtier areas of the pool rather than treating every section of the vessel exactly the same.

“When you take a step up into the S Series, that’s when you get into our more premium products,” Michaelis said. “So you’ll get longer run times and battery life, more square footage for larger pools, and then that’s where we start to introduce some of those really cool features like in-the-water charging and self-emptying.”

Cutting the Cord Was Only the Beginning

Cordless operation itself represents an important shift in robotic pool cleaning. Traditional suction-side cleaners require hoses, while earlier generations of robotic cleaners remained tethered to power supplies. Removing those connections changes the ownership experience.

With WYBOT’s cordless technology, the process is intentionally straightforward: charge the cleaner, place it in the pool and select the appropriate cleaning mode. Depending on the model and setting, the robot can address the pool floor, walls, waterline and steps.

Once cleaning is complete, it returns to its retrieval point. WYBOT includes a hook that attaches to a standard pool pole, allowing the cleaner to be brought to the surface.

“What we’re trying to do with cordless technology is really simplify that experience of cleaning the pool,” Michaelis said.

The S Series starts from that cordless foundation and asks a different question: how many of those remaining interactions can be eliminated too?

Cordless cleaners solved the cord problem, but they created another routine. The cleaner still has to be removed from the pool to recharge.

Michaelis said WYBOT heard that complaint directly from customers.

“Yeah, it’s great that I don’t have a hose, which is truly something I’m looking for, but that one step further that I wish I didn’t have to take is removing the cleaner from the pool every time that it needs to be charged.”

That feedback led to the S2 Solar and S2 Solar Vision.

Instead of requiring the owner to retrieve the cleaner and connect it to a charger after each cycle, the robots can dock themselves along the side of the pool. A solar-powered dock charges the cleaner while it remains in the water.

“The sun charges the base. The base then charges the robot,” Michaelis explained. “The robot then can be set on a schedule to run Monday, Wednesday, Friday or however many days the pool owner would like it to run during the week.”

The result is a robotic cleaner beginning to function more like permanent automated pool equipment than an accessory that must manually be deployed and retrieved.

But WYBOT kept listening, and customers identified yet another point of friction.

“Our customers said, that’s great that it’s charging in the water,” Michaelis recalled hearing, “but I have to take the robot out to clean the basket.”

That became the problem targeted with the latest iteration, the S3, which incorporates the functionality of the S2 Solar Vision and now adds self-emptying capability. After completing its cleaning cycle, the robot returns to the dock and transfers collected debris into a separate poolside bin.

“All the pool owner or the pool pro is doing is taking that tray out and emptying that tray of all the debris and putting that tray back in,” Michaelis explained.

It’s a relatively simple action, but it represents something bigger happening within the category. First the hose disappeared. Then the power cord. Now charging, scheduling, docking and even emptying the onboard debris basket are becoming automated.

The Push Toward Less Human Interaction

That trajectory is familiar territory for Michaelis, whose background before joining WYBOT was in consumer robotics at iRobot.

“In any robotics industry, your goal is to make the user experience as autonomous as possible,” he said. “You want as little human interaction with your robots.”

The pool industry is beginning to follow the same path already seen in other consumer robotics categories. Navigation is becoming more sophisticated. AI-assisted systems can influence where a cleaner goes and how it approaches the pool. Battery technology has removed the tether. App connectivity provides another layer of control, while docking, solar charging and scheduled cleaning are reducing the need for owners to deploy equipment manually.

“Where I see the robotic pool cleaning industry heading is trying to make it as autonomous as possible,” Michaelis said, “trying to reduce the amount of human interaction that you have with your robots, and ensuring that they’re doing the jobs that they’re set out to do.”

For homeowners, that means convenience. For pool professionals, it can have an entirely different value proposition.

A Better Ownership Experience Builders Can Sell

For builders trying to connect with increasingly tech-savvy pool buyers, equipment has become another opportunity to differentiate the finished project.

A self-parking, self-charging and self-emptying robotic pool cleaner isn’t simply another piece of equipment sitting in the pool. It’s the kind of feature a builder can demonstrate during turnover and immediately show a customer how much of the routine maintenance process can happen automatically.

Michaelis sees that as a potential finishing touch on a premium pool package.

“On the builder side, it’s really going back to that innovation piece,” he said. “It’s a surprise and delight moment at the time of purchase.”

When builders are assembling an equipment package for a prospective pool owner, he said, “adding some self-emptying robotic pool cleaner is just the cherry on top for that customer and really provides that top-notch experience.”

That’s an important part of WYBOT’s positioning. The company isn’t simply trying to connect with consumers shopping online for another cleaner. It’s developing features that builders, retailers, and service professionals can put in front of their own customers as part of a better pool ownership experience.

For service companies, meanwhile, the conversation moves from convenience to productivity.

Why Service Pros Are Paying Attention

Discerning service companies looking to recommend best-in-class robotic cleaning technology have good reason to gravitate toward products offering greater autonomy and less human interaction.

The robot isn’t replacing the service professional. Instead, it can work in the background during the six days between weekly service visits, continually handling a portion of the physical cleaning workload before the technician ever arrives.

Michaelis said some pool companies already view robotic cleaners as an efficiency tool rather than an optional accessory.

“We constantly hear feedback from service companies on how many more doors they’re able to service, how many more pools they’re able to service, how quickly they can get pools done so that they can get to the next customer, and how many more they can fit within their route,” he said.

In fact, some have made automated cleaning a prerequisite for taking on a customer.

“We actually have some service companies that actually won’t service clients unless they have some sort of robotic cleaner in their pool so that they can be the most efficient when they’re stopping by on a weekly basis,” Michaelis said.

That changes the role a robotic cleaner can play in the relationship between the pool professional and homeowner.

A service company recommending a premium robotic cleaner isn’t necessarily selling its customer a replacement for professional service. It’s giving that customer a machine capable of working between visits while simultaneously giving its technicians a cleaner pool to work with when they arrive.

And as those robots become increasingly autonomous, the value proposition gets stronger.

A cleaner that has to be manually deployed, retrieved, charged, and emptied still asks quite a bit from the homeowner. A cleaner capable of following a schedule, parking itself, recharging and transferring its own debris asks considerably less.

For WYBOT, that’s where the S Series—and particularly products such as the S3—begins to stand out. It’s also where two decades of manufacturing robotic cleaners starts to matter more than how recently consumers began seeing the WYBOT name.

The brand may be relatively new to some pool owners and professionals, but the company behind it isn’t. Now, rather than innovating behind the scenes for other brands, WYBOT is putting that experience behind products designed to connect directly with homeowners and the professionals serving them.

Ready to take a deeper dive?

Listen to our entire conversation with Nathaniel Michaelis, General Manager and Vice President of the Americas for WYBOT on the Pool Magazine Podcast.