Preparing the published article.
Battery, Water and Consumable Logs for a Cleaning Fleet
What to record per shift so battery, water and consumable use stay predictable across a robot fleet.
Record Per Shift, Not Per Month
Monthly reports hide the operational detail that a facility manager actually needs, because refuelling problems appear and disappear within a single shift. Build a shift record instead, one line per machine per shift, completed at handover while the machine is still in front of the person writing it. The fields worth recording are: date and shift, machine identifier, operator, start and end state of charge, charging start and end time, litres of clean water loaded, litres of recovery water emptied, chemical or dose setting used, brush or pad hours, filter and squeegee condition noted as pass or attention, and a short free-text line for anything that interrupted the run. Add the count of completed routes and the count of abandoned routes, because those two numbers disagree more often than expected and the difference is where the useful questions live. Do not record only the exceptions. A record that captures normal shifts too is what lets you see a trend rather than a single incident, and it is what a service contractor can hand to a client when utilisation is questioned. Agree who owns the record, where it lives, and how long it is kept before the first shift, not after the first dispute.
Track Refill Logistics, Not Just Tank Capacity
Refill logistics usually decide whether a machine is practical, and they are rarely examined during a demonstration. For each zone, identify the nearest water point and its flow rate, the route from the machine's working area to that point, whether the route is clear at the hour the refill happens, and who performs the refill. Then time it: record the minutes a refill takes from the moment the machine stops working to the moment it resumes. That single measurement tells you whether the machine spends more of its shift travelling to water than cleaning. The same applies to waste water disposal, chemical dosing, brush changes and filter cleaning. Distinguish clearly between tasks the operator is expected to perform and tasks that need a different trade, because a task that requires a plumber or an electrician is a lead time, not a step in a checklist. Finally, check the storage point: where do spare brushes, pads, filters and chemicals live, and is that store within a reasonable walking distance of the zones being cleaned? If the answer is a distant plant room, the refill time you measured will be longer in practice than it looked on the day.
Run A Worst-Case Round And Log The Recovery
Once the records exist, use them to define a worst-case round: the busiest zone, the longest route, the heaviest soil load, a full tank at the start and a machine that has not been freshly charged. Run that round and record whether the machine completes the work without a mid-shift stop. Battery capacity in isolation rarely explains a problem; charging behaviour, state of health over time, and the match between run time and shift length do. Note the state of charge at which the machine returns to its dock, and how long it takes to reach a usable charge again, because those two numbers set how many machines and how many charging positions a site genuinely needs. Compare that run time against the length of the shift you are actually staffing, not against the shift you would prefer. Then write the exception plan: what the operator does when the machine stops mid-route with water still in the tank, whether a wet-floor condition is created if a tank is emptied on a public route, and who is called when a machine cannot return to its dock because a corridor is blocked. Write the plan as a short list the operator can follow without calling anyone, and keep a copy in the charging area. Name a person, not a department.
Photo credits: the images in this article are licensed reference photographs of the relevant robot class, credited with author and licence in each caption; they are not photographs of the specific equipment discussed. Licence and author details are recorded with each image.