With smart cleaning robots, will cleaners also lose their jobs?

In the dark workshop, silent automated equipment has replaced the rows of operators who used to sit silently on the production line. This Foxconn factory, which was selected as a "lighthouse factory" by the World Economic Forum for its "lights-off factory" feature, has outlined the future production scene for people - unmanned production lines and lights-off factories.

Automated production equipment will not only replace industrial workers, but will also make the huge logistics group almost useless - in time, Foxconn will no longer need to manage a large canteen, let alone purchase a dozen freezers to store chicken legs in the employee canteen.

"In a factory without people, do we still need to hire people to sweep the floor?" Gao Jin, president of Xidi Intelligent, suddenly raised this question during a discussion with Eo New Manufacturing. If a factory with lights off is to truly be "unmanned", it should naturally have robots that can complete cleaning tasks.

According to Yiou New Manufacturing, the commercial cleaning robot industry has not yet seen an explosion. The leading manufacturers have different understandings of demand priorities, and their products are also in the early stages of mass production and order delivery.

Although they are confident about the market prospects of this "blue ocean", if we delve deeper into whether commercial cleaning scenarios can usher in the trend of "machines replacing people", we have to answer three questions: Does the demand exist? Is the replacement cost-effective? Does the function meet the requirements?

The demand is real, and domestic substitution is not cost-effective for the time being

It has become a trend that increasingly intelligent robots are taking over human labor: more and more industrial robots and collaborative robots are entering manufacturing and production scenarios; welcoming robots responsible for customer service and reception services are entering commercial scenarios such as bank branches; and the sweeping robots that have been popular in the past two years have entered household scenarios.

Compared with the industrial scene that is following the path of automation and intelligence and the household scene where it is popular as an electronic consumer product, intelligent robots have the characteristics of large scale and rapid implementation in the commercial market. Liu Hong, an expert of the overall expert group of the "Intelligent Robot" field of the National Key R&D Program and a professor at Peking University, pointed out that there is a rigid demand for intelligent robots in the public service field and they can be scaled up. The current service robot technology is already able to meet the demand; household service robots cannot replace jobs, let alone family members.

Liu Hong's view can be well verified in the cleaning robot market. Whether it is a home or commercial scenario, the main function of a cleaning robot is floor cleaning. In housekeeping services, there is no position that only cleans the floor, and a home sweeping robot can only complete part of the housework.

Correspondingly, there are 10 to 15 million employees in the domestic commercial cleaning scene, of which 25% to 30% are specialized in floor cleaning - they push long mops and go back and forth on hard floors such as marble, and are only responsible for timely removal of footprints and dust to ensure that the floor is shiny and bright. Calculated at an average annual employment cost of 50,000 yuan, the labor employment cost for commercial floor cleaning alone is currently in the hundreds of billions. It is undoubtedly "easy to get" to replace such simple mechanical labor with machines.

In the face of a demand for replacing human labor worth hundreds of billions of yuan, is it worthwhile to launch cleaning robots? It is worthwhile. According to the calculations of Qin Baoxing, CTO of Gaoxian Robotics, it only takes two to two and a half years to recover the cost of replacing cleaning personnel with commercial cleaning robots.

However, the main competitor of commercial cleaning robots is not cleaners, but the human-machine collaboration model enabled by automated cleaning equipment. Compared with them, commercial cleaning robots have no price advantage.

E-IO New Manufacturing has integrated the products and quotations of three leading manufacturers, Gaoxian Robot, Nuwa Robot and Xidi Intelligent. Currently, commercial cleaning robots are mainly divided into two categories: indoor and outdoor. The retail price of the former is between 120,000 and 150,000 yuan, while the corresponding outdoor products are between 250,000 and 300,000 yuan.

Manually operated ride-on and push-type commercial sweepers are much cheaper, with small push-type sweepers priced at around 10,000 yuan, and large ride-on sweepers priced at 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. One person plus an automated sweeping device can complete the work of 3-5 people, not only can the cost be recovered in just a few months, but the stability and efficiency are also slightly better than smart cleaning robots.

Before robots replace humans, China's commercial cleaning market will undoubtedly experience a transition period of automated cleaning equipment to reduce the number of people. Although the cleaning industry is facing the impact of rising labor costs and an aging population, the overall wage level is not high, and it is unrealistic to convince property companies to invest too much.

Developed countries and regions with higher labor costs are likely to be the first to enter the explosive growth period of commercial cleaning robots. At present, the average salary of cleaning staff in the United States has reached 40,000 US dollars a year, and in Hong Kong it has exceeded 160,000 Hong Kong dollars a year. The cost of cleaning robots is already competitive with the human-machine collaboration model. In actual interviews, the interviewed manufacturers also have overseas orders and have moved from the experience test stage to delivery.

It is an irreversible trend for robots to replace humans in repetitive labor. However, because the domestic human-machine collaboration model still has cost advantages, the popularization of commercial cleaning robots in China will have a transition period. In countries and regions with higher labor costs, the competitiveness is stronger, and the situation of "blooming within the wall and fragrant outside the wall" will appear.

Two industry barriers are hard to break: low-speed autonomous driving technology and industry characteristics

The domestic replacement demand worth hundreds of billions of yuan has indeed given commercial cleaning robots a relatively easy business story to tell, but the role of integrators and the already red ocean market for household sweeping robots have led people to mistakenly believe that the commercial scenario is also an industry with low technical content and a low threshold.

Commercial cleaning robots are essentially the same as service robots in other commercial scenarios, and their technology can be broken down into motion control and industry function realization. The former mainly uses low-speed autonomous driving technology, with the motion control module supporting the robot's movement and obstacle avoidance; the latter is responsible for the realization of floor cleaning functions, including monitoring cleaning quality, trajectory planning, etc.

Yiou New Manufacturing learned in an interview that the sensing and positioning technologies needed for commercial cleaning robots include laser radar, millimeter-wave radar, and high-precision maps. The use of sensors is related to indoor and outdoor application scenarios. Laser radar is not very good at detecting black objects, so millimeter-wave radar is very necessary for outdoor scenes. This is also one of the reasons for the obvious price gap between indoor and outdoor robots.

Cheng Haotian, founder of Gaoxian Robotics, once said in an interview that unmanned driving technology and robot mobility technology are the same technology, both within the four quadrants of environmental perception, path planning, motion control, and SLAM, and the threshold is not low.

Gao Jin told Yiou New Manufacturing that the investment and financing of high-speed autonomous driving has cooled down, and autonomous driving technology urgently needs to prove its commercialization ability, relying on stable cash flow rather than financing to support the company's operations. The low-speed autonomous driving used by commercial cleaning robots is a scenario that is closer to implementation and has rigid demand.

In addition to technical barriers, the industry characteristics of commercial cleaning scenarios are another barrier to this track.

Gao Jin believes that Xidi Intelligent's shareholders are veterans in the cleaning industry, so Xidi has a more accurate grasp of the pain points of the cleaning industry. If an autonomous driving company wants to cross borders, finding industry needs and pain points will become a hindrance.

Liu Songting, vice president of Nuwa Robotics, also expressed a similar view in an interview that commercial cleaning robots are not a simple enlargement of the household version because the two scenarios are logically different. Therefore, it is difficult for manufacturers of household sweeping robots to cross over to commercial scenarios.

According to the observation of iResearch New Manufacturing, the current manufacturers in the commercial cleaning robot field are indeed "pure" and there are few cross-border manufacturers.

Whether it is Gaoxian Robotics, Zhixingzhe, Nuwa Robotics or Xidi Intelligent, none of them have entered the home scene, and no leading manufacturer of home sweeping robots has "crossed over" to commercial use. Although Yangzi, a long-established manufacturer of automated cleaning equipment, has launched a home sweeping robot, its product line for commercial scenes is still hand-push and ride-on sweepers of varying sizes.