Why Facilities Are Moving to Multi-Vendor Cleaning Fleets

Are facilities really mixing robot brands?

Facility operators are reportedly moving toward cleaning fleets that combine robots from more than one manufacturer, with one team and one layer of software watching all of them. The appeal is simple. No single brand builds the right machine for every surface in a building, and a mixed fleet lets a manager match the machine to the floor.

The cost is equally simple. Every additional brand adds a dashboard, a support agreement and a point where two systems must agree. The shift is directional rather than measured, since most of the sources behind it are vendors with a stake in the answer. The patterns still repeat across several documentation reviews and ranking datasets, which is why the trend deserves a careful look.

What the fleet rankings show

FieldBots' Biggest Fleet 2025 ranking counted 97 fleets. Of those, 59 ran robots only, 20 ran only microbots, and 18 ran mixed combinations. Twelve of the mixed fleets were managed by cleaning service providers. FieldBots is a platform vendor, so read that split as a signal rather than a census.

The same ranking says no single vendor dominates, and European facility management portfolios often combine several suppliers. Biggest Fleet 2025 cites Mitie integrating 800 TPLC units alongside larger scrubbers as one of the few mixed fleets. The same landscape page notes Tennant's Walmart fleet at 1,850 units and Flagship Facility Services operating 100 SoftBank Whiz units in the US. Those figures show scale, not what mixing costs.

Where a second brand earns its place

Surface fit is the strongest reason to add a brand. As of October 2026, Gausium offered compact vacuums through large scrubbers such as the Scrubber 50 and Phantas, according to Biggest Fleet 2025. Pudu, best known for delivery robots, has expanded into cleaning with the CC1 and MT1. Kärcher entered robotics with the KIRA B50 autonomous scrubber, and Tennant partners with Brain Corp on autonomous ride-on scrubbers such as the T7AMR. Cleanfix's RA660 is cited as one of the earliest autonomous scrubbers.

In practice, a facility might give a compact unit the narrow back-of-house corridors and a large ride-on class machine the open concourses. That split pays off only when the floors, the traffic pattern and the operating hours support it. A site assessment is the place to test that, not a brand catalog.

Why the management layer tends to break first

Each manufacturer ships its own fleet management software, so operations teams end up switching between dashboards. A ToolSense product page states 'FM companies are deploying robots from three, four, sometimes five different manufacturers,' and lists the resulting problem as ten OEM portals with different logins. That is vendor-reported, but it matches what easytoclean describes: with several brands, coordination falls to the organization itself, covering separate zones, time slots, docking stations and two dashboards checked one after the other.

Interfaces multiply quickly. easytoclean reviewed public documentation for 101 robots from 35 manufacturers, published 9 Sep 2026, and offers a simple example. A building with four cars from two manufacturers means two interfaces, not one. The study reports documentation, not verified field performance.

How much of a mixed fleet can talk to each other?

Standards exist, though they are unevenly adopted. VDA 5050 was published in 2019 by the German automotive and materials-handling equipment industry, and it lets a central system command robots from different manufacturers. easytoclean calls VDA 5050 'marginal' in cleaning. In its database, only Kärcher announces it, and only on 3 models.

Lift integration is spread unevenly too. The same study counts published lift integration from Gausium (8), Pudu (7), Cleanfix (1), Yijiahe (1), OrionStar (1) and Ecovacs (1). API publication includes Gausium (12), Pudu (7) and Kärcher (3). These are vendor documentation counts, not measured performance, but they suggest that a brand mix can decide how many building systems a fleet reaches without custom work.

Orchestration platforms try to fill the gap. A 2026 progressiverobot guide describes three platform types: a vendor fleet manager that rarely mixes brands, a multi-vendor orchestrator that handles mixed brands through adapters or VDA 5050, and an observability platform. ToolSense lists its cleaning fleet platform as integrating 15 or more robot brands, which is also vendor-reported.

What do coordination failures look like on the floor?

AOMANBOT, a vendor, argues that the break 'is in the coordination layer.' Its examples are overlapping cleaning routes, conflicting elevator reservations and separate incident inboxes. Those failures rarely appear in a sales brochure. They appear when two units claim the same freight elevator, or when a fault is logged on a dashboard the night crew never opens.

Data is a quieter gap. ORION STAR, a robot maker writing an integration guide, says most platforms export PDF or CSV, and that native CMMS or BMS API integration 'is not yet universal.' Brain Corp, writing in 2026 about retail AMRs, makes a related point: a robot that needs its own proprietary dashboard and cannot talk to other vendors' robots becomes an operational bottleneck.

How do support contracts multiply with each brand?

Each brand brings its own service model. Kärcher offers KIRA Care and KIRA Care Plus packages. Per the ORION STAR guide, they bundle a web portal, software updates, a functional guarantee that includes the battery, planned service visits and, on the Plus tier, a fast-response replacement machine. Gausium and Pudu offer optional workstations for charging, fresh-water refill and wastewater drainage. These features are useful, but they arrive as separate line items, separate service calendars and separate escalation paths.

Over-the-air updates add another variable. easytoclean says OTA updates are documented for only a third of models. A facility running three brands may be tracking three update policies, and the documentation behind some of them may be thin.

What should the contract say before the second brand arrives?

easytoclean advises buyers to request the API documentation, the lift manufacturer list, the update policy, and the map and report portability terms, and to write reversibility into the contract. AOMANBOT warns that exported data may not be portable, and that the coordination layer 'cannot be re-pointed,' which it describes as lock-in with extra licenses.

Service Robot Co. approaches the same problem from the integration side. We are an OEM-neutral integrator, so we select robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service each unit through a nationwide US engineer network. Our offer is a lease: a 3-year lease with one fixed payment, quoted after a site assessment, with one vendor for the whole lifecycle. That does not erase the questions above, but it places them in one agreement instead of a stack of them.

How long does a mixed fleet take to go live?

ORION STAR's guide describes a planned 2 to 6 week deployment window per site as typical, covering mapping, safety review and staff training. The same guide says physical constraints are 'the most common reason a planned deployment fails.' Each added brand brings its own mapping workflow and training routine, and those must fit inside the same window.

Before adding a second brand, a facility team should document the surfaces, lifts, docks and quiet hours first, then match machines to those constraints. The trend is real enough to plan around, and the sources behind it are strong enough to question.