Robot++ (史河科技), a Beijing-based general-purpose robotic startup, unveiled BeeBotPro, a high rise exterior cleaning robot at an industry exhibition in Shanghai yesterday.
BeetBotPro, with a size of 1,240*835*355 mm, weighs 47 kg itself. It can ascend and descend a building’s glass windows at 12 m per minute, cleaning up to 900 sqm of surface per day.
The product can be deployed to remove dirt and impurities from the glass walls of buildings no taller than 180 m.
Its updated version, BeeBotMini, due to be introduced in the second half of this year, was also on display at the China Clean Expo held in Shanghai.
BeeBot comes with Robot++’s proprietary sealed cleaning modules, giving the device an ability to supply four-in-one solutions, covering washing, scrubbing, slathering and used water reclying and filtering.
Currently, the facades of China’s high rises and skyscrapers continue to be cleaned manually by so-called “spidermen” cleaners. The process is risky, inefficient and as the nation rapidly ages and labor costs spiral upward, the demand for mechanized outdoor cleaning has been growing.
According to Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a third-party research institute, of the world’s 50 tallest skyscrapers in 2022, China had 25. Data shows that China’s glass facade cleaning market is valued at 40 billion yuan (US$5.8 billion).
The need for safer, more cost-effective ways of facade cleaning tailored to skyscrapers has spurred the growth of specialized robotic cleaners, freeing humans from this tedious task.
BeeBotPro, which carries a water purifier and scratch-free scrapers, can clean up the protruding parts of a high building’s glass windows such as frame and ornamental strips, leaving no blind spots during the process, Robot++ said.
The gadget also possesses technologies that enable real-time transmission of images showing the robot in action. This feature allows the user to control multiple robots at once remotely and increase efficiency.
Robot++ said BeeBotPro can achieve the roughly same results as traditional “spidermen” at work but the efficiency is twice as high.
Founded in 2015, Robot++ specializes in high rise cleaning robotics and is the first among domestic peers to commercialize its know-how, the company claimed.
It has been a recipient of several awards such as “Little Giant” that are usually conferred on officially recognized high-tech startups. It has filed upwards of 280 patents.
“In the future, Robot++ will tap more deeply into technologies intended for this segment, and continue to provide clients from various industries with high building unmanned cleaning solutions,” said Dr. Xu Huayang, founder and CEO of Robot++ while introducing BeeBotPro at the Shanghai fair.
