Press days for CES wrapped up over the weekend and the show floor in Vegas opens today, and per usual my Twitter timeline is a firehose of "here's the weirdest gadget at CES" tweets. I've been half-following this stuff since I started this blog back in 2011, and every single year there's a moment where I think, huh, that's actually clever, followed immediately by five moments of, why does this exist.
This year that second category has a clear champion: Charmin's RollBot. Yes, that Charmin. Procter & Gamble brought a toilet-paper-fetching robot to CES and showed it off at their press event last week. It's a little wheeled robot, you summon it with an app when you're stuck on the toilet without a fresh roll, and it drives a spare over to you. I am not making this up. There's a video. The robot has a face, or at least eyes, painted on the front of it, which somehow makes it worse.
I want to be clear that I don't think this is a scam or vaporware or whatever cynical thing people say about CES concepts. It's a real prototype, it apparently works, and someone at P&G's innovation lab is very proud of it. My complaint isn't that it's fake. My complaint is that it's a perfect little monument to what happens when "add an app and a motor to it" becomes a default instinct instead of a considered decision. You don't need a robot for this. You need to keep spare rolls within arm's reach, which is a problem solved decades ago by a small shelf.
Contrast that with the other big CES reveal from last week, Samsung's Ballie. Ballie is this little orange ball, about the size of a softball, that rolls around your house, projects stuff onto walls, checks on your pets, and is supposed to work with your other smart home gadgets. Samsung's exec rolled it out on stage and it chased a dog around. It's a concept too, and it's probably five years (optimistically) from being an actual product you can buy, if it ever is. But at least the pitch makes sense to me as a piece of ambient technology, I can picture wanting that, even if the execution is TBD. I cannot picture wanting the toilet paper robot no matter how good the execution gets.
This is the tension that CES exposes every single January, and it's why I have a complicated relationship with the show even though I've never once attended in person (someday, maybe, if my employer ever decides sending me to Vegas for a week is a good use of expense budget, so far, no). Half the announcements are legitimately interesting signals about where consumer hardware is heading. Rollable displays, better on-device AI, whatever LG is doing with OLED this year. The other half is a parade of companies bolting Bluetooth onto household objects because the R&D budget existed and somebody had to spend it before the fiscal year ended.
I don't think RollBot is going to ship, for what it's worth. Concept demos like this rarely turn into SKUs, and if it does show up on shelves I'd bet real money it gets quietly discontinued within eighteen months, the same graveyard that ate the Wi-Fi enabled juicer a couple years back. But I also don't think that matters much to Charmin. The point of bringing a robot to CES isn't to sell the robot. It's to get exactly the kind of write-up I'm giving it right now, a paragraph on some blog nobody at P&G will ever read, mentioning the brand name three separate times. Mission accomplished, I guess, even from someone making fun of you.
Anyway. Show floor opens today, so there's another four days of this coming down the pipe. If something shows up that actually changes how I think about my own setup at home, I'll write about it properly instead of just dunking on a toilet paper robot. No promises though. The dunking is more fun to write.