Cleaning Automation

The field of cleaning automation has grown in the last years, for floor cleaning and other areas, in the home and beyond. Buoyed by recent innovations in sensing and navigation technology, automated cleaning systems have gotten past laboratory status and are used for a diverse set of applications all over the world. By far the biggest market value is attributable to robot vacuum and floor cleaners, which sold over 11.6 million units in 2018 (World Robotics Report 2019 (International Federation of Robotics IFR 2019).). While versatile, high-performance systems exist for other applications such as professional floor cleaning, ship cleaning, and facade and solar panel cleaning, they are by no means as widespread as household systems for floor and window cleaning. Automatic cleaning systems for professional cleaning tasks are frequently complex robot systems that operate autonomously in unstructured environments and/or outdoor areas. Cleaning automation not only incorporates cleaning engineering but also a variety of other technical disciplines, e.g., kinematics, power supply, sensor systems, environment modeling, path planning in dynamic environments, and autonomy. Some examples of automatic cleaning systems for floors, facades, swimming pools, ship hulls, ventilation ducts, and sewer lines serve to highlight the current state of the art and the potential of cleaning automation and provide a glimpse of future developments.