Robots for airports, transit and public venues

The first Neo scrubber at a United States airport went to work in Cincinnati in 2019 and cleaned 200,000 square feet a week in its pilot. Big open hard floors with people in the way are exactly what these machines were built for, and the venues that run them have written up the numbers.

Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.

Who this is for

You operate a terminal, a station, a stadium or a convention center with hundreds of thousands of square feet of hard floor, a housekeeping contract, a security operation, and a perimeter that has to be watched around the clock.

What automates first here

• Autonomous floor scrubbing: large-tank machines on open floors, mapped once
• Overnight building patrol: ground patrol robots inside empty concourses
• Parking structure patrol: decks and garages, the most common first patrol job
• Perimeter patrol by drone dock: a docked aircraft flying the fence line on a schedule, with the regulatory read stated plainly
• Weapons screening and public agency purchasing: the government door covers screening equipment and how public venues buy it

Machines that usually make the shortlist

Avidbots Neo 2 is the airport scrubber with the longest public record, and Tennant's large platforms compete for the same floors. Patrol robots from Knightscope, Cobalt and others cover concourses and garages. Perimeter work splits between ground robots, fixed sensors from Senstar and Southwest Microwave, and docked drones, and the honest answer is often a mix. Steel Collar is an Avidbots dealer and ranks on fit.

Every machine named on this site is in the published matrix with figures checked against the maker's material and no prices, because a price before an engineer has seen the job is a guess.

What has to be true before anyone quotes

• Square feet per night and the hours the floor is actually clear of passengers and vendors.
• Water and dump points, charging, and where the machine parks by day.
• Security integration for any patrol robot: who watches the feed and who responds.
• Airspace rules for any drone, which at an airport start with the FAA and the airport operator.
• Public procurement rules if you are a public authority, including cooperative contracts.

When a robot is the wrong answer here

• Floors that never clear of people and carts.
• A patrol robot with nobody watching the feed.
• Drone patrol at an airport without an airspace plan.
• Buying to a brochure coverage number.

Someone has already done this

Common questions

How many scrubbers does a terminal need?

The Cincinnati airport started with one Neo, mapped up to 750,000 square feet for it, and planned more from the results. Start with one on the largest open floor, measure real coverage for a month, and size the fleet from that.

Can a robot patrol a garage instead of a guard?

It can walk the deck, record and alert. It cannot respond. The casebook has a police department running a patrol robot in a park; the lesson there is that the value is deterrence and eyes, priced accordingly.

We are a public authority. How do we buy this?

Through the government door: Abe, our concierge for agencies, covers cooperative contracts, sourcing rules and what a written quote has to contain.