Street Sweeping Robot: From Horse Brooms to ABB

A street sweeping robot does a job cities have paid people to do for centuries: work along the gutters, brush up dust, leaves and litter, and carry it away before it blocks the drains or blows back into homes. This post follows street sweeping from brooms and horse-drawn brush carts to the motor sweepers that still clean most roads, then looks at the small driverless sweepers now working parks and plazas in China and the Gulf. It ends with where ABB robots could fit, mostly in building, charging and servicing these machines. For now that is only a possibility.

Women sweep sand off a street by hand in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 2022. Photo: EKokou / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How streets were swept by broom, horse and engine

For most of history a clean street depended on a broom. Some towns ordered each householder to sweep the stretch of road in front of their door, and when traffic was mostly horses, cleaners gathered the droppings to sell as fertilizer to nearby farms. Cities later hired their own sweepers, many of them women, who worked with a broom, a basket and a shovel, like the street cleaner photographed in Munich in 1913. The work was dusty and slow, and it was done beside moving traffic. In many places it still is: in Ouagadougou, crews of women sweep sand off the roads by hand.

A woman street cleaner poses with her basket and broom in Munich, 1913. Photo: Edmund F. Arras via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines arrived in the industrial cities of the 1840s. In Manchester, then said to be the unhealthiest place to live in England, Joseph Whitworth built a mechanical street sweeper, and in 1849 C.S. Bishop patented a street sweeping machine in the United States. Most of the more than 300 American sweeper patents issued before 1900 had no engine at all: a horse pulled the cart, and the turning wheels drove the brush through gears or chains. In 1896 Charles Brooks patented a sweeper with front brushes of different lengths and a way to collect the dirt, and its brushes could be swapped for a scraper to clear snow and ice.

A sweeping machine of Haarlem's municipal cleaning service on trial on an ice rink, 1917. Photo: unknown author, Noord-Hollands Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The engine came next. In the fall of 1911 John M. Murphy took his plan for a motor-driven pickup sweeper to the American Tower and Tank Company in Elgin, Illinois. After two years of development, Boise, Idaho, bought the first Elgin sweeper in 1913, and its street commissioner worked out a saving of $2,716.77 over a horse-drawn machine. That work grew into the Elgin Sweeper Company, which still builds sweepers such as the Pelican. From the 1970s, worry about water quality changed the goal, because fine dust washed into drains carries pollution, and many sweepers today are certified to collect PM10 and PM2.5 particles. Every one of them still had a driver in the cab.

An Elgin Pelican street sweeper at work in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2012. Photo: Dwight Burdette / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Driverless sweepers on real streets in 2026

Taking the driver out started on paths and plazas, where speeds are low. In China, small electric sweepers with a lidar on the roof, like the one photographed on a footpath at the Beijing Botanical Garden, already work in parks. WeRide, better known for robotaxis, tested its Robosweeper in Beijing in 2023 and launched the Robosweeper S1 in April 2024, calling it the first L4 unmanned sanitation vehicle built for open roads. In Shantou it moved from trials to regular day and night shifts along Haibin Road. In Finland, Trombia Technologies sells the Trombia Free, an all-electric autonomous sweeper that the company says uses 15% of the energy of a conventional high-performance sweeper.

A self-driving cleaning robot with a roof lidar sweeps a footpath at the Beijing Botanical Garden. Photo: Henrysz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

This year the contracts got bigger. In June 2026 Micropolis Robotics signed a five-year agreement with Abu Dhabi's Department of Municipalities and Transport to design, build, deploy, run and maintain a fleet of autonomous mini sweepers, with sensor fusion, fleet orchestration and predictive maintenance built in. In September a driverless sweeper with four side brushes stood on Skyworth's stand at IAA Transportation in Hanover. On 28 September openPR carried a Future Market Insights forecast that the autonomous street sweeping and municipal fleets market will grow from USD 260 million in 2026 to USD 3,584 million by 2036. Forecasts like this are guesses, but they name the reasons cities give: night shifts and labor shortages.

A driverless sweeper with four side brushes on Skyworth's stand at IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover. Photo: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build street sweepers, and no source links its robots to these projects. Its closest product is the Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that finds its way through factories with 3D Visual SLAM, building its map from camera images instead of following tape on the floor. A sidewalk sweeper does the same job outdoors, plus rain, curbs and people on foot. Where ABB could fit today is in the plants that build sweepers. Frames, hoppers and brush arms are welded steel, the kind of work ABB arc welding robots with positioners already do in other industries. We covered the indoor cousins of these machines in our post on robot vacuum cleaners.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What it takes to put a robot sweeper on every street

Over the next few years the job will probably split in two. Small autonomous sweepers are likely to take the predictable work first: plazas, parks, campuses, bike lanes and pedestrian streets swept at night, when few people are around. Large truck sweepers like the Elgin Broom Bear will keep a driver on main roads for longer, because they share lanes with cars and buses. For people at home the change will be quieter. Residential streets could be swept more often by small machines, and private versions could clean car parks and gated estates, close relatives of the sidewalk delivery robots already rolling through some neighborhoods.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The sweeper is only part of the system. A driverless machine still has to empty its hopper, recharge, get worn brushes replaced and have its sensors cleaned, and today people do all of that. Micropolis lists operation and maintenance in its Abu Dhabi contract, and Trombia sells a service station and a remote operating center with its sweeper. This is where industrial robots could help at the depot. An ABB arm on an OmniCore controller could swap brushes or plug in chargers, and the cell would first be laid out and checked for reach and collisions in RobotStudio. No such ABB depot cell exists yet, so treat it as a possibility.

Engineers with an ABB OmniCore controller and robot cell. Photo: ABB

Then there are cost, safety and skills. A sweeper that hits a child or a parked bike becomes a news story, so cities will want safety rules and remote operators who can take over when the machine gets stuck. The machines are still expensive next to a broom, and many cities rely on low-paid sweepers whose jobs will change. Fleets also need people who can watch them from a control room and repair a lidar at 3 a.m., and some of those people could come from today's sweeping crews if cities pay to retrain them.

An Elgin Broom Bear truck sweeper parked at the roadside, 2021. Photo: DestinationFearFan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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