Have you ever been lying in bed peacefully, only to be rudely awakened by your bladder? The trek to the bathroom feels a million miles away. Well, now your toilet can come to you, and a Chinese company is banking on that being worth $13,000.At this year’s Shanghai International Aged Care, Assistive Devices, and Rehabilitation Medical Expo, accessibility brand Yueban unveiled the Xiaoban, an AI-powered autonomous robot toilet built for people with disabilities, semi-disabilities, or limited mobility. The toilet finds you. That’s the product.Using an AI 3D Obstacle Avoidance System, the Xiaoban navigates to its user, dodges whatever’s on the floor like a Roomba, and after use, activates its Lidar to return to its docking station unassisted. A self-directed robot toilet with better spatial awareness than most people parallel parking.Back at its docking station, the Xiaoban hooks into the home’s existing plumbing and runs everything through a low-noise grinder before flushing it out. A self-cleaning cycle follows, pressurized water jets and UV light, and a foam shield with activated charcoal filters makes sure the air in the room keeps its mouth shut.It retails for around $13,000 on the Chinese market, with no international release date yet.A Robot Toilet Could Actually Be UsefulYes, the jokes write themselves. But the people this was actually built for aren’t laughing at it. For someone with serious mobility impairments, getting to a bathroom independently isn’t a minor inconvenience, it’s a daily logistical problem. Bedside commodes exist, but someone still has to empty and clean them, usually a caregiver. A toilet that handles all of that on its own is a meaningful thing, even if it sounds absurd from the outside.The Xiaoban didn’t debut at a tech bro showcase. It showed up at an expo for aged care and rehabilitation, in front of the people who actually need it. Global populations are getting older, in-home assistive technology is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and the bathroom hasn’t meaningfully evolved in decades. The timing makes sense even if the product still sounds wild.At $13,000, the price is what it is. For someone weighing that against the cost of lost independence or full-time care, it’s a different conversation.The bathroom isn’t going anywhere. For the people this was built for, that used to be the problem.The post This Robot Toilet Comes to You When You Need to Go (It’s Absurdly Expensive, Though) appeared first on VICE.