There is a very specific pose every Australian dad has perfected. Feet planted wide, hands on hips, chin slightly raised, eyes scanning a freshly mowed lawn or a car that’s finally lost its bird strike collection. We call it the Dad Stance. It is not about vanity. It is about the quiet, chest puffed satisfaction of a job done properly, usually after an entire Saturday was sacrificed to it.
Think about what an Aussie home actually looks like on a good weekend. The Hills Hoist casting its shadow over freshly cut grass. Bifold doors thrown wide open so the line between kitchen and backyard basically disappears. A pool shimmering out the back, half filled with noodles and half with kids who refuse to get out even when their lips have gone blue. It’s an outdoor culture built on entertaining, and every one of those scenes depends on the boring bit nobody wants to do first, the mowing, the window cleaning, the pool skimming, the upkeep that eats into the very weekend it’s meant to protect.
I found myself at The Calyx in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, surrounded by glasshouse greenery and, somewhat incongruously, four robots that are about to make the Dad Stance a lot easier to earn. ECOVACS ROBOTICS used the setting to launch its new home and outdoor cleaning range for Australia, and after an hour wandering between demo stations, I walked out convinced this is less a gadget drop and more a genuine changing of the guard for how we do chores. Every product on show was designed around one idea, that the Australian backyard is a living room with the roof taken off, and deserves to be treated that way rather than left as a never ending chore list.
Stop Mowing, Start Chilling
The two headline acts are the GOAT A2000 LiDAR PRO and the GOAT O600 RTK, a pair of robotic mowers built for very different Australian backyards, from the sprawling acreage blocks out past the fringe suburbs to the tighter, oddly shaped quarter acre blocks closer to the city.
The A2000 is the one for the bigger blocks, handling lawns up to 2,000 square metres. What sets it apart from the mower category generally is the HoloScope 360 system, stacking Dual LiDAR, AI Vision and 3D ToF LiDAR so it can map a garden and dodge more than 200 common obstacles without ever touching a boundary wire, the trampoline, the cricket stumps, even the dog. Most robotic mowers still leave you doing the edges by hand, which defeats half the purpose. This one has an integrated TruEdge Trimmer that cuts along the perimeter as it goes, so the job actually finishes itself. A 32V cutting system and dual blade discs mean it isn’t fazed by thick couch or kikuyu, and it will climb a 50 percent slope, which matters once you’ve tried pushing a normal mower up anything resembling a hill. It covers ground at a genuine clip too, up to 400 square metres an hour, so a big block that used to eat your entire Saturday can be done before you’ve finished your second coffee.
The O600 RTK is the more compact sibling, designed for lawns up to 600 square metres and the fiddlier layouts a lot of suburban blocks have, the narrow side strip, the dog leg around the shed. The standout here is setup speed. TrueMapping 2.0 uses Multi Fusion RTK navigation to map your lawn without wires, and ECOVACS says it can be up and running in about 15 minutes. It still packs 150 percent cutting power for dense grass types like buffalo and kikuyu, plus a 45 percent slope capability, so smaller doesn’t mean watered down. TruEdge consistent edge mowing and AIVI obstacle avoidance keep coverage tight right up against garden beds and paving, not just down the middle of the lawn.
What genuinely separates both from older robotic mowers on the market is the wire free setup and the edge trimming built in rather than left as an afterthought. That’s the difference between a robot that helps and one that does 80 percent of the job and leaves you finishing the rest with a whipper snipper anyway.
GOAT A2000 LiDAR PRO: $2,999 AUD
GOAT O600 RTK: $1,299 AUD
Stop Wiping, Start Viewing
Next up was the WINBOT W3 OMNI, a window cleaning robot aimed squarely at the kind of home a lot of us are living in now, where a big stacker door or a wall of glass is the only thing between the kitchen and the entertaining area. It’s the modern Australian floor plan in a nutshell, indoor and outdoor living blurred into one space, which is beautiful right up until the glass gets grimy and that seamless view turns into a smudged one.
The feature that had everyone at the launch leaning in was the Vortex Wash Station, which ECOVACS is calling the industry’s first contact free wiping pad wash. It cleans and refreshes the pads in about a minute with no manual scrubbing and no dirty cloths to deal with afterwards, usually the most annoying part of window cleaning, robot assisted or otherwise. WIN SLAM 5.0 navigation, TruEdge tech and a three nozzle wide angle spray system work together for genuinely edge to edge coverage, so you’re not left with that telltale streaky border a lot of window robots leave behind. It also adapts on the fly to different window types and obstacles, and a 12 stage protection system, including 10,000 Pa suction and a 100kg rated safety cable, means you’re not standing there white knuckled watching it work two storeys up. For anyone with glass they can’t safely reach themselves, that safety cable alone is worth the price of entry.
WINBOT W3 OMNI: $1,299 AUD
Stop Scrubbing, Start Swimming
Rounding out the range is the ULTRAMARINE P1, a robotic pool cleaner that felt like the product most tailored to how we actually live outdoors here. Australia’s relationship with the backyard pool is practically cultural, it’s where birthday parties happen, where the kids burn off energy after school, where half the family Christmas photos get taken, and this thing is built to keep that relationship low maintenance rather than another chore competing for your weekend.
It runs on 18,200 LPH UltraPure suction technology to clear leaves, sand, gum nuts and general debris, the kind of stuff that blows in off a gum tree or gets tracked in on bare feet all summer. Up to three hours of runtime means it can get through a full clean without needing a recharge halfway across the pool floor, and SmartNavi navigation maps efficient cleaning paths for up to 99 percent coverage rather than randomly bumping around and hoping for the best. Marine grade durability means it’s built for the actual conditions of an outdoor Aussie pool, the harsh UV, the chlorine, the debris load after a windy day, not a sanitised showroom version of one. It’s the kind of product that means the pool is ready to jump into on a whim, rather than something you have to prep for the night before.
ULTRAMARINE P1: $999 AUD
Meet the ambassador: Steven Bradbury
ECOVACS brought on Steven Bradbury as the face of the campaign, and if that name rings a bell, it should. Bradbury is the Australian short track speed skater who became a household name at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, winning gold in the 1000m after every other skater in the final crashed out on the last corner, leaving him to cross the line first. It’s one of the most famous moments in Australian Olympic history, and “doing a Bradbury” has stuck around in the national vocabulary ever since as shorthand for the unlikely underdog win.
Talking to him on the day, he was upfront about going in sceptical. He wasn’t convinced a robot could actually save him meaningful time or get a job done properly without him standing over it. That changed fast once he saw the results. He kept coming back to how clean everything came up, genuinely surprised by it.
The line he repeated more than once, with the kind of dry humour you’d expect from him, was “read the instructions.” It’s a very Australian dad joke and a very true one, we’re either the blokes who chuck the manual straight in the bin or the ones who read it three times before we’ll even plug something in, and there’s rarely an in between. His point was that with this range you barely need to be either, the instructions are that straightforward and the gear does most of the thinking for you anyway.
On the products themselves, he singled out the ULTRAMARINE P1 for actually scrubbing and climbing the walls rather than just gliding around the floor, which he reckoned was the bit that impressed him most given how much pool grime tends to sit right at the waterline. He called the WINBOT W3 OMNI a life saver, specifically for glass up high that he’d otherwise avoid touching altogether. And on the GOAT A2000 LiDAR PRO, he was won over by it mapping the garden and trimming the edges itself, no whipper snipper required, which for a bloke who’s spent plenty of Saturdays doing exactly that by hand is about as high a praise as it gets.
The Dad Stance, upgraded
Growing up, chores were hard yakka, full stop. Mowing was a Saturday morning tax, done in thongs you weren’t supposed to be wearing, dodging dog bombs and hoping the extension cord didn’t run out halfway across the yard. Windows got done with a squeegee, a bucket of metho water and a lot of muttering about streaks that just would not budge. The pool skimmer was basically a fifth family member, propped against the fence, always slightly too far from where you needed it. And at the end of it, there was always that moment, standing back, hands on hips, quietly knowing you’d earned the rest of the weekend.
What struck me most at The Calyx wasn’t the specs, impressive as they are. It was the realisation that the Dad Stance doesn’t have to disappear just because the labour has. Picture it now. It’s a Saturday morning, the mower is already three quarters done before you’ve had breakfast, the windows are catching the light without a smudge, and the pool is sitting there glassy and inviting rather than needing a skim before anyone’s allowed near it. You can still walk outside, take it all in, and feel that same satisfaction, minus the sunburn and the sore back. The robots do the hard yakka now, quietly, in the background, while you’re inside flipping snags or out the front chatting to a neighbour. The stance is still very much yours to keep. You just don’t have to bleed for it anymore.
Available online and through major retailers from 4 August 2026.
