a major public university campus in Canada with six autonomous hard-floor scrubbers
How a Canadian University Campus Redirected 500+ Custodial Hours With Scrubbers
Six autonomous hard-floor scrubbers on a major Canadian campus cleaned more than 2.7 million square feet and freed 500+ labor hours for twice-daily high-touch work.
- 500+ hrs
- labor shifted
- 2.7M+ ft²
- floors cleaned
- 6
- scrubbers live
- 2x daily
- touch cleans
Based on a documented real-world deployment. Figures are from public reporting; the organization is not named.
Twice-daily sanitization squeezed floor time
Caretaking teams on a major public university campus in Canada already treated classroom cleanliness as non-negotiable. When pandemic safety rules required disinfecting door handles, railings, elevator buttons, and push plates twice every day, those high-touch passes crowded out the slow work of scrubbing corridors and lecture halls.
Floor and carpet care had always been labor heavy. With the same headcount asked to double detailed wiping, managers needed a way to protect hard-floor quality without hiring an army of overnight mop crews.
Six mapped scrubbers managed from the cloud
Facilities leaders introduced six fully autonomous hard-floor scrubbers in March 2020, each mapped to specific building zones across science, classroom, and research towers. Caretakers roll a unit to its start point, press go, and move it to the next floor when the mapped run finishes, so humans stay on sanitization while machines handle repetitive scrubbing.
A cloud dashboard tracks area cleaned, runtime, and water use so supervisors can tune routes and document performance. The units filter and recirculate wash water, which supported the campus sustainability goals while keeping daily passes predictable.
- Map each scrubber to a building zone before classes peak
- Start runs with minimal touch, then relocate between floors
- Monitor coverage and water use through a cloud portal
- Keep caretakers on twice-daily high-touch disinfection passes
Documented square footage and hours returned
Since deployment, the six scrubbers have cleaned more than 2.7 million square feet cumulatively, according to the university’s public facilities update. That volume came from autonomous passes across multiple academic buildings rather than ad hoc mop buckets squeezed between sanitization rounds.
The same source reports that more than 500 hours of labor were redirected away from floor scrubbing toward other cleaning tasks, including the expanded high-touch program. Caretakers described gaining daily time they could spend on sanitization instead of pushing machines down long corridors.
What campus operators can borrow from the playbook
This documented deployment is not a Service Robot Co. customer story. It shows how higher education can treat autonomous scrubbers as scheduled crew members when health rules reshape the cleaning mix. Service Robot Co. helps U.S. colleges and commercial sites select vendor-neutral scrubbers, set up commercial cleaning robot rental or month to month lease paths, map buildings, train custodial staff, and keep fleets running through a nationwide network of regional service engineers.
A free site assessment can mirror the same sequence on your footprint: quantify hard-floor square footage, pilot one mapped route, measure hours returned, then scale only where cloud reporting proves the coverage you need.
