Ask five suppliers how to choose a floor cleaning robot and you will get five feature lists. The lists are not wrong, they are just backwards — they start from the machine. A decision you will live with for years should start from your building. This checklist runs the eight questions in the order that actually narrows the field, with the numbers you need for each one.
The eight checks
1. What is actually on your floor?
Everything else follows from this. Dust, sand and packaging debris need a sweeper. Grease, spills and stuck grime need a scrubber that works with water. A large smooth floor that is mostly dusty but must never be wet — think showrooms, galleries, occupied offices — is the natural case for a waterless machine that sweeps, vacuums and dry-mops without any liquid at all. If you cannot answer this question in one sentence, stop here; a wrong answer makes every later number meaningless. Our separate guide on floor scrubber vs sweeper walks through it in detail.
2. What is the narrowest passage the robot must fit through?
This single measurement eliminates more models than any specification sheet. Measure the tightest gap on the routes you actually want cleaned — doorways, between fixed shelving, lift lobbies — and compare it to two figures: the machine’s body width, and its minimum passage width, which is usually wider because it accounts for turning and sensor clearance. To give a sense of the spread: compact machines pass through roughly 800–900 mm, mid-size units sit around 1,000 mm, and wide-area machines need 1,700 mm or more. A machine that cannot physically take the narrow zones is not 20% less suitable — it means those zones stay on the manual roster forever.
3. How much floor must it cover, in how many hours?
Take the cleanable area and divide by the real cleaning window. Then apply the correction almost everyone skips: plan on 40–60% of the rated efficiency once turns, obstacles, traffic and recharge stops are counted. A machine rated at 4,000 m²/h in an open hall will not sustain that in a warehouse with racking, and the manufacturer usually says so themselves — one popular scrubber is rated 1,987 m²/h theoretical but 500–1,300 m²/h practical. We size every project on the practical number. If the arithmetic says one machine cannot cover the area in the window, the honest answer is two machines, not one heroic specification.
4. What infrastructure are you willing to install?
Traditional scrubbers need a water point and a drain — ideally automated as a fill-and-drain workstation. Waterless machines need nothing but an ordinary power socket for a charging post. If your building has no convenient plumbing where the robot will live, or if wastewater disposal is a hassle in your industry, a waterless machine can be the difference between a two-week installation and a two-hour one. This is also the first question facilities teams ask us after “how much”.
5. When will it run — and how quiet must it be?
A machine that works only at 2 a.m. has different acoustic requirements from one cleaning a hotel lobby at 10 a.m. Check rated noise, and check whether there is a dedicated low-noise mode — the better machines run under 62 dB(A), which is quieter than a normal conversation, and some offer a silent mode that trades a little speed for runtime. If the robot must work around the public, noise rating is not a nice-to-have; it decides whether daytime cleaning is possible at all.
6. Does the runtime cover the window?
Rated efficiency per hour is meaningless if the battery dies at the halfway point of your window. Compare runtime per charge against your cleaning window, and look for two behaviours that matter more than battery size: the robot must resume where it stopped after recharging rather than restarting the whole route, and it must return to the dock by itself. A machine that restarts from the beginning after every charge silently wastes the first half of a long shift, every single night.
7. Who verifies the work was done?
This is the question that turns a purchase into a programme. If the robot runs unattended — overnight, across shifts, across sites — you need task status visible remotely: which zones were cleaned, when, and which were skipped. For facility managers, that record is the difference between “the floors look fine” and a defensible answer to “was level 2 cleaned last night?”. Manual cleaning almost never produces this trail; most robots do it as a matter of course. Make sure the reporting is included, not an add-on.
8. What safety standard and sensor set does it carry?
Look for a sensor stack that combines LiDAR with cameras and physical collision sensors — LiDAR alone maps the world but the camera layer is what recognises a person or a pallet that arrived after mapping. On the standards side, IEC 63327 is the emerging international safety standard for automated floor-cleaning machines; some models can already be supplied in configurations compliant with it, which matters most in environments with strict procurement rules — hospitals, airports, public buildings.
Quick reference: the machine classes, one line each
| Class | Example | Rated efficiency | Passage / width constraint | Water | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compact scrubber | Scrubber 50 | 1,987 m²/h theoretical 500–1,300 practical | 800 mm passage 1,100 mm turnaround | Wet, 30/24 L tanks | Hard floors need washing in tight, furniture-dense spaces; wash-and-dry in one pass. |
| Compact all-rounder | SC50 | 1,800 m²/h | 900 mm passage | Wet, 42/30 L tanks | Retail stores, offices, cafes and lobbies — narrow layouts a large machine cannot enter. |
| Compact waterless | SW55A | 1,200 m²/h | 615 mm body | None — 4-in-1 dry | Occupied areas, no plumbing available, wet floors unacceptable, quiet operation required. |
| Mid waterless | SW80A | 1,600 m²/h | 1,025 mm body | None — 3-in-1 dry | Large open floors where no water station can be installed; fleet operation from one charging post. |
| Long-hours workhorse | SC80 | 4,000 m²/h | 1,340 mm body | Wet, 140/170 L tanks | Warehouses, basements, car parks — unattended overnight cycles with big tank reserves. |
| Wide-area sweeper | S100-N | 3,000 m²/h | 1,700 mm passage | Dry, 60/60 L tanks | Indoor large-span halls plus outdoor paved areas — terminals, complexes, grounds. |
All figures are manufacturer specifications. If your building is a mix — a showroom with a warehouse attached, a store with a loading yard — treat it as two zones and pick one machine per zone rather than searching for one machine that does everything badly.
Three mistakes that cost buyers the most
Buying on rated efficiency
The number on the datasheet assumes an open floor and no interruptions. Real throughput in a working building lands at 40–60% of it. Two machines sized on practical figures will beat one machine chosen on a headline number, at similar total cost.
Ignoring the narrowest passage until installation day
It is the last thing measured and the first thing that strands a machine. Measure it first, not during commissioning — and remember the relevant number is minimum passage width, not body width.
Forgetting to ask who maintains it
Routine upkeep on modern machines — brush checks, filters, the small debris trays — is deliberately designed to need no specialist. But somebody on your team still owns it. Decide who, before delivery, not after the first week.
Next steps
If you are also deciding between autonomous mobile robots and traditional automated guided vehicles for material transport, that is a separate decision with its own logic — see AMR vs AGV. For the industry-by-industry view of where these machines deploy, start from the solutions by industry hub.
And if you want the checklist applied to your building instead of worked through in the abstract: send us the three numbers — floor area, narrowest passage, cleaning window — and we will come back with a machine mix and a realistic coverage estimate. Contact us for a quote.