A Cincinnati airport puts a Neo scrubber on 200,000 square feet a week
Airport terminal operations · Autonomous floor scrubbing · Vendor published
This account comes from a robot maker, integrator, or their marketing partner. Treat every performance and payback figure as advertising until an engineer verifies it against your own job.
The job
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport doubled its passenger count from 4.5 million to 9.1 million a year and had 120 in-house and contract housekeepers scrubbing terminal floors by hand-driven machine. In 2019 its innovation office went looking for a way to keep floors clean through the growth without adding headcount, saw Neo working at Singapore Changi in July, and put the first unit to work on November 13, 2019, the first Neo at a United States airport (published-by-vendor).
The shop
A large public airport with an established housekeeping team and an innovation office that measures projects on payback. Nobody was let go; staff moved to supervising and maintaining the robot and to work the robot cannot do.
The equipment
Avidbots Neo, one unit to start, roughly 472 kg, about 112 L of water, up to 6 hours on a charge, cleaning at about 1.35 m per second; the airport mapped up to 750,000 square feet for it.
The published numbers
About 200,000 square feet cleaned per week during the pilot and more than 5 million square feet in the first year (published-by-vendor); the airport's own estimate of about $30,000 a year in value at eight hours a day, a 12 to 18 month payback and a five year life (published-by-vendor).
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
The airport's payback math assumed eight hours of running a day, which is a fleet-style duty cycle; a robot that runs two hours a night pays back much more slowly. Use this as proof that an autonomous scrubber holds up in a busy public terminal with people in the way, not as a promise of the dollar figure. Airport floors are open, hard and mapped once, the easiest case this category has.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Tell Joe what you are running. He will give you an honest preliminary assessment, and he will tell you if a robot is the wrong answer for your situation.