As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, warehouse spaces get dirty and call for a small army to keep them tidy. No matter if a space is used in a light or extreme duty fashion, outside soils always find their way into a warehouse and mostly accumulate right on the floor. These soils present a handful of issues, not least of which are potential product contamination and safety hazards. This fact drives warehouse managers to assign proactive, frequent floor cleaning tasks up to the point that their finite staff is stretched thin. To help offset the demands of such tenuous floor cleaning, a subset of automated warehouse equipment known as autonomous floor cleaners stands ready to serve. Autonomous floor sweepers and scrubbers continue the industry’s push towards new warehouse technology to transfer repeatable tasks from human laborers to robotic technologies, which given today’s precarious labor market, couldn’t come soon enough.
Before getting into their many benefits, let’s explain what defines an autonomous floor cleaner:
- Autonomous vehicles such as floor cleaners utilize sophisticated control platforms that allow them to independently guide their own actions within predefined parameters. No human operator needed.
- These vehicles are excellent at standardized, routine, predictable cleaning tasks such as daily aisle sweeping performed in long, straight paths.
- Where a vehicle’s autonomous capabilities truly shine is in their ability to adapt to quickly changing conditions, especially regarding safety and accident avoidance – reactions that have historically required a human’s judgement.
- To do this, autonomous vehicles utilize a host of technological “eyes and ears” that allow them to interact with the physical world such as sensors, instruments, network connections, and remote (often cloud-based) computing processes.
- We’re using the term “floor cleaners” to represent multiple discrete vehicle types including sweepers, scrubbers, washers, vacuums, and more. In other words, practically all industrial floor cleaning processes can be automated!
Key Benefits of Autonomous Warehouse Floor Cleaners
Autonomous floor cleaners are beneficial in more ways than just providing highly reliable cleaning, including:
- Opportunistic Cleaning – one of the greatest features of automated floor cleaning is being able to instantly deploy a cleaner during opportunistic lulls in warehouse activity. Managers no longer have to pull staff off of more critical tasks to run a cleaner out to idle areas. On a larger scale, the ability to deploy cleaners at varying times means that dedicated floor cleaning assignments and shifts may no longer be necessary since now this cleaning can occur around normal operations.
- Labor Reallocation – further to the above point about freeing up labor from dedicated floor cleaning assignments, automatic floor cleaner machines can directly provide a significant amount of labor hours back to the business that can be utilized in better ways. In recent projects, we’ve seen clients recoup up to 85% of their floor cleaning staff labor using autonomous cleaners, which are immediately reallocated to higher-tier functions.
- Data-Driven Cleaning Missions – every warehouse has areas that are more difficult to clean than others, taking extensive time and effort to tackle. Autonomous floor cleaners can provide a way to minimize this variation and cost by automatically gathering and analyzing data on each cleaning mission to find possible improvements such as breaking long missions into smaller, more frequent cleaning passes.
- Integrated Safety – autonomous floor cleaners are built with multiple safety elements including pedestrian detection, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) positioning sensors, vision cameras, and even voice command response. Taking safety even further, advanced automatic floor sweeper and scrubber machines can be fully Integrated into warehouse control systems, allowing them to follow established speed limits and travel paths as well as adapt routes on the fly around other vehicles, lift trucks and pedestrians.
- Optimized Cleaning Efficiency – when it comes to automated robotic systems, they are nothing if not consistent. Within a short amount of time after deployment, automatic floor cleaner robots will have mapped out ideal cleaning routes that are repeated every day with very little variation in time and cleaning quality. In this way, autonomous cleaners deliver extreme cleaning efficiency in terms of both time and cost.
Evaluating Autonomous Warehouse Floor Cleaning Solutions
The decision to incorporate autonomous floor cleaning equipment into a warehouse’s fleet needs to be approached from several angles. Of course, investment cost is the main consideration, but the technical aspects of the application must be given just as much attention. Examples include:
- Labor Cost Basis – as readers will have gleaned, the primary benefit of robotic floor cleaning is reducing a warehouse’s cleaning labor demands. For this reason, warehouse managers should determine their exact labor cost basis for floor cleaning, which is made up of the exact payroll costs and indirect expenses associated with their floor cleaning activities. If the labor cost basis is only a few hours a month, investing in a robotic floor cleaner may not be worthwhile. However, the investment becomes advantageous when the labor cost basis exceeds a few full shifts a month.
- Cleaning Requirements – in tandem with the above cost basis assessment, warehouse managers should also consider their technical cleaning requirements and expectations. Routine floor sweeping, vacuuming, and steady-rate scrubbing are great matches for automatic floor cleaner machines. More complex cleaning challenges that present lots of soil variations, drastically changing conditions, or that need real-time abstract judgement may be better suited for rider cleaning vehicles. As with most technologies, this added complexity equates to rapidly increasing costs, so it is important that buyers capture and communicate their realistic application requirements to receive the best suited solution at a justifiable cost.
- Operational Options – when it comes to space constraints, there are two variants of autonomous floor cleaners worth mentioning: rider-option (which is built with human controls for situational manual operation) and rider-less (which can only be self- or remotely-operated). Rider-less options can be smaller and less expensive, but may be limited in their ability to handle unique challenges. Rider-option units offer the best of both worlds though often at a higher cost and larger size. Buyers will need to carefully weigh how a new autonomous floor scrubber will be operated, and how it will fit into their fleet of other units.
- Warehouse Layout – autonomous floor cleaning equipment offers many new design options for warehouses, including smaller turn radii, footprints, aisle widths, and parking areas. While existing warehouses typically don’t need physical changes to accommodate new autonomous equipment, newly designed warehouse areas should be tailored to harmonize with these vehicle’s unique attributes (such as building in automated, centralized charging positions for faster deployment to all corners of the warehouse).
We hope that this discussion has been helpful for your commercial material handling needs. Fairchild Equipment is the Upper Midwest’s premier Material Handling Equipment and Service resource, with headquarters in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and numerous locations serving needs 24/7 across Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Northern Illinois, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For more information or to discuss which Warehouse Optimization solution might be best for you, please send us a message or call us at (844) 432-4724.
