Floor Scrubbing Robot: From Mop Bucket to ABB Vision

A floor scrubbing robot does the job of a cleaner walking behind an auto scrubber. It puts down cleaning solution, scrubs it into the floor and vacuums the dirty water back up through a squeegee in one pass, but it drives the route by itself. Airports, warehouses, shopping malls and universities already use them. This post traces the job from the mop and bucket through Tennant's riding scrubbers to the robots from Brain Corp, Avidbots and Tennant. Then it turns to this autumn's news and to the ABB navigation technology that already steers one of these machines, and it ends with the work that still needs a person with a mop.

An X4 ROVR autonomous floor scrubber at work in a Morrisons supermarket in Worthing, December 2025. Photo: Andy Li / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From the mop and bucket to riding scrubbers

The mop is an old tool. The word appears in English in the late 15th century, spelled mappe, and inventors kept improving the way the head was held. Jacob Howe received US patent 241 for a simple mop holder in 1837. In 1876 Edward H. Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary described a mop as a scrubbing rag or "bundle of junk" fixed to a handle, and wringers with rollers for squeezing out the water were already known. In 1893 Thomas W. Stewart patented a design that held the mop with springs and levers.

Ella Watson, a government charwoman in Washington, D.C., with her mop and broom, 1942. Photo: Gordon Parks, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tennant, today a leading maker of floor cleaning machines, began as George H. Tennant's woodworking shop in Minneapolis in 1870. The company moved into wood flooring and, in 1932, into motorized floor cleaning equipment. Its engineers built the first vacuum-equipped power sweeper for industrial use in 1947, and in 1970 the company developed what it calls the first riding scrubber built from the ground up, followed by its first walk-behind scrubber in 1978. An auto scrubber of this kind carries a tank of clean solution and a separate recovery tank. In one pass it wets the floor, scrubs it with a disk, cylinder or oscillating pad and vacuums the water back up.

A ride-on floor scrubber at work in a shopping mall, 2020. Photo: GiuliaVic / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots followed. iRobot's Scooba was an early floor scrubbing robot for homes and is no longer made. For commercial floors, Brain Corp has worked on AI robotics since 2009, and Avidbots in Kitchener, Ontario, has designed and built autonomous cleaning robots since 2014. In 2018 Tennant launched the T7AMR, its first fully autonomous scrubber, which runs on Brain Corp's operating system. By May 2023 Tennant counted more than 6,000 autonomous units deployed around the world. In Switzerland, the cleaning machine maker Wetrok started a robot scrubber project with Professor Roland Siegwart's lab at ETH Zurich, with support from the Swiss innovation agency Innosuisse.

An Avidbots Neo floor scrubber cleaning a shopping center on its own, 2017. Photo: MrVollbrecht / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robot scrubbers at work in 2026

On 20 October Tennant launched the P1 VAC, its first autonomous vacuum and the first model of a new P-Series. The company plans to introduce 10 new products within 24 months and to build a $250 million robotics equipment business by 2028. A month earlier the floor care supplier Nassco pointed to the 2026 Building Service Contractor Market Study, which found that about 32% of cleaning contractors plan to adopt robotic floor equipment within 12 months, roughly double the 2025 share. In the same study, 44.6% expected labour problems to grow and 72.5% expected wage demands to rise.

An Avidbots Neo 2 cleaning a warehouse floor autonomously, 2021. Photo: Skylarlawrencelebel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The robots now work in large public buildings. Avidbots says its machines clean airports, warehouses, factories, malls and universities for customers in more than a dozen countries. Brain Corp says more than 50,000 robots run its BrainOS software and calls its fleet of floor scrubbers and vacuums the largest in the world. Tennant says the P1 VAC uses its navigation and sensors to work safely in busy, changing spaces, with routes scheduled and watched from an app. The robots leave some work behind. Most auto scrubbers cannot reach edges, corners or the floor under a drinking fountain, and Nassco expects staff to keep restrooms, detail cleaning and inspections. Our post on airport terminal robots covers the busiest floors.

A cleaning robot making its rounds at Bangkok's BKK airport, 2022. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not sell floor scrubbers, but its navigation technology already steers one. Sevensense, a 2018 spin-off from ETH Zurich that won ABB Robotics' Innovation Challenge in 2021, is now part of ABB as its global product center for Visual SLAM mobile robots. It built the camera-based navigation into Wetrok's Robomatic Marvin, a Swiss scrubber-dryer based on the company's Discomatic Mambo. A cleaner shows Marvin how to clean an area once, and the robot then repeats the job on its own, or it can be driven as an ordinary manual machine. ABB uses the same Visual SLAM in its Flexley Mover AMRs, and each one builds its own map and shares it with the fleet.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604, which finds its way with Visual SLAM, in a warehouse. Photo: ABB

What comes next for floor scrubbing robots

Factories and warehouses put cleaning robots on the same floor as robots that carry parts. Sevensense sells its Alphasense Position as one map for all vehicles, and ABB says each Flexley Mover P604 positions itself to within 10 mm and shares what it learns with other robots in its fleet. If a scrubber and a parts carrier in one plant used the same map, cleaning could be planned around deliveries. Nobody has announced such a setup yet. ABB already lets users build AMR missions in AMR Studio with drag-and-drop tools, the kind of no-code programming a cleaning supervisor would need.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carries a pallet of crates past injection moulding machines. Photo: ABB

At home the same idea is sold as a robot mop or vac-mop, and rules are now shaping that market in the US. In late July the FCC announced a ban on new foreign-made robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers and some robot pool cleaners, which also catches robots assembled in the US when foreign parts make up more than 35% of the cost. In October Matic, a Silicon Valley company that assembles its $1,495 vac-mop in California, became the first robot vacuum maker to receive a conditional approval. The history of the home machines is covered in our post on robot vacuum cleaners.

An iRobot Scooba 450, one of the early floor scrubbing robots for homes. Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cost is the first question for any building owner. In a 2019 AACEM and ISSA survey, 77% of possible buyers named labour savings as a reason to buy and about 70% expected a robot to pay for itself within two years. Nassco adds that the case depends on how much floor work is repetitive, how much the machine is used and whether the freed staff time goes somewhere useful. Edges and corners still need a mop. Safety gets more formal in factories: ABB says its Flexley Mover P603 meets the ISO 3691-4 and ANSI 56.5 safety standards, and a scrubber sharing that floor would face the same questions. Someone also has to teach the routes, empty and rinse the tanks after each shift and look after the machine.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 with a load of crates; ABB says the model meets the ISO 3691-4 and ANSI 56.5 safety standards. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com