Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch retailer, announced many months back that it is bringing in 500 bots to roam the aisles of its stores. These bots have a single purpose — to alert the staff about those areas of the store that need mopping. Ahold Delhaize is also running a contest to find the best robots to scrub floors. Softbank backed Whizz claims to have sold 10,000 units of its commercial cleaning bots.
All these point to the burgeoning trend of hiring bots to keep floors clean. COVID-19 is accelerating this trend. People shying away from menial and repetitive jobs leaves the doors and floors open for bots to flourish. The global market for cleaning bots is growing at around 15% CAGR and is expected to reach USD 4.94 Billion by 2023. This includes residential, industrial, and commercial bots for cleaning floors, lawns, and glass.
India has around 600 million sqft of office space and 105 million sqft of retail space. That is a huge cleaning opportunity, an opportunity that has caught the attention of entrepreneurs and VCs alike. IIT Bombay incubated Peppermint is an early bird. Many more are likely to enter the cleaning bot space over the years to come years.
Building bots involves many trades — industrial design, mechanical engineering, hardware systems, firmware & software. And to say hardware is hard would be an understatement. Components and target prices, vendor delays, mechanical designs that do not work for the electrical engineers (and vice versa) are just a few things that could throw a spanner in the works.
But hardware is necessary — software alone cannot cater to all our needs. A post by Rohin, the founder of Nymble, sums it up very well. So, how can we help entrepreneurs build next-gen bots? Hint: take some load off their backs.
At Mowito, we have taken it upon ourselves to build the best of the breed navigation software, just so that robo-prenuers have one less problem to worry about. Navigation software available from other players in the market today is tightly coupled with the hardware they provide, or they are meant to add navigational capabilities to a specific group of legacy machines, like forklifts or tractors.
Mowito does away with these constraints. Mowito’s navigation stack is hardware agnostic and works with minimal integration for any bot that runs on wheels. This means two things:
1) Bots powered with Mowitio’s navigation stack know their way around the moment they are switched on.
2) Savings achieved in time and resources translate to faster launches and lower burn rates.
What is more, Mowito’s stack as a service is priced to be easy on the wallet (aka pay as you go). If you are a robo-prenuer, do get in touch with us. We would love to work with you to bring your bots to life.
