What Is a Microbot?

In the 2024 edition of The Biggest Fleet and FieldBots’ industry overview Radar, a new category quietly emerged: the Microbot. The definition is deceptively simple – a professional cleaning robot that costs under $10,000 and is compact enough to be shipped by post. And yet, this modest classification marks a profound shift in the robotics industry: the ambition to bring commercial-grade floor cleaning to the scale, affordability, and simplicity of consumer devices.

Microbots sit in the space between two worlds: on one side, the household robot that vacuums your living room; on the other, the industrial floor scrubber navigating the marble corridors of an airport terminal. The Microbot is neither, and as of today, it almost doesn’t exist.

Sure, there are dozens of models that fit the physical criteria. Browse the FieldBots OS Ready Robots list and you’ll find strong contenders: compact, affordable, relatively intelligent machines that sweep, vacuum, and dock themselves. But there’s one thing they all have in common: they don’t mop.

And that, as it turns out, makes all the difference.

The Product Gap Everyone Feels

The commercial cleaning industry is undergoing a systemic transformation. The challenge is no longer about convincing customers that automation makes sense – it’s about delivering the right hardware at the right size. The market knows what it wants: a small, robust, affordable robot that can clean the floors.
The problem is simple to state and hard to solve. Mopping involves liquids, which means clean and dirty water tanks, precise dosing systems, and suction mechanisms. These additions require space, weight, power, and control. A robot that can mop must be able to:

• Carry water (and know how much is left)
• Apply and recover that water effectively
• Handle dirt, residue, and even small debris
• Navigate complex environments with minimal support
• Be maintainable and operable by staff without special training

In other words, it must do what large scrubber-dryers do, but in a much smaller form factor – and at a fraction of the price

Why It’s So Hard to Build

It turns out that shrinking cleaning technology is not just a design problem – it’s a systems engineering nightmare. Water management alone introduces significant complexity. Pumps, filters, vacuum motors, sensors for tank levels and flow control – all need to be miniaturized, ruggedized, and optimized for a robot that might weigh less than 20 kg.

And then there’s the weight paradox: to exert real cleaning pressure, the robot needs mass. However, adding mass increases motor requirements, battery size, and costs. The tank sizes required for even 30 minutes of wet cleaning can quickly exceed what’s viable in a “postable” unit.

Beyond that lie the structural economics. The consumer segment relies on extremely high volumes and razor-thin margins. Industrial floor scrubbers justify their complexity through high margins and limited production runs. The Microbot sits in a no-man’s land between the two – a segment where you need both scale and performance, without the pricing leverage of either.
This is why even the most promising prototypes tend to stumble. They’re too large. Or they’re too expensive. Or they don’t clean well enough. Or they require sophisticated docking stations that assume infrastructure, which doesn’t exist on-site.

The Ideal Use Case: Maintenance Cleaning

Where the Microbot would shine is maintenance cleaning: regular, scheduled or on-demand cleaning of hard floors in environments that are too small or too fragmented for larger autonomous machines. Think back offices, narrow hallways, staff kitchens, classrooms, changing rooms, break areas – places where cleanliness matters, but where full-size robots can’t justify their presence.
These are the very environments that still rely heavily on manual labor – often from overburdened staff. Retail employees, for instance, are routinely expected to keep floors clean during business hours, alongside customer service and shelf restocking. In education and healthcare, janitorial teams are stretched thin across dozens of zones. The potential for a compact, autonomous helper is immense.
It’s not about deep cleaning. It’s about good enough, often enough – exactly what robots are good at.

What It Needs to Do

At a minimum, the ideal Microbot must:

• Sweep or vacuum dust and debris
• Apply clean water for mopping
• Recover dirty water reliably
• Return to its docking station
• Charge itself
• Communicate with the cloud and fleet management platforms

Whether water handling occurs in the robot or the docking station remains flexible. In most cases, manual tank swapping may be sufficient – especially if the robot is small enough to carry and service easily. The expectation is not full autonomy in the industrial sense. Instead, the interface should be as simple as a consumer robot: start, stop, status, and clean the bin. That opens the door to hybrid workflows where humans launch the robot manually but are freed from the task of physically cleaning. Importantly, these robots must be able to scale: not one device, but dozens or hundreds across a facility network. Which means software, connectivity, and reliability matter just as much as mechanics.

Who’s Trying – and Why It’s Not There Yet

Several manufacturers are quietly pursuing this opportunity. In Asia, companies like CVTE, Reeman, and BIB have been observed experimenting with pre-launch units, some even reaching international pilots. But the results so far are mixed. FieldBots’ Microbots Lab in Singapore has evaluated a number of these candidates – most are not yet ready.
The challenges vary. Some devices show promise but fail to meet cleaning expectations. Others deliver performance, but at the cost of size or price. Few achieve the balance needed to unlock the segment: a true Microbot that mops.

Will 2027 Be the Year?

Industry observers are cautiously optimistic. The momentum is clearly there. Hardware innovation in vacuuming bots continues at pace, and the push for mopping functionality has intensified – driven in part by the success of sweep-and-vacuum microbots in recent years.

Rumors persist of larger OEMs exploring hybrid units that could fill the gap. FieldBots expects that by 2027, we will see the first commercially viable Microbot with full wet-cleaning capability under $10,000. It may not be perfect, but it will be good enough to matter – and it will open the door for new business models, broader deployments, and smarter automation at the long tail of floor care.

The Next Big Thing, in a Small Form

The dream of the Microbot is not just about miniaturization. It’s about scale. It’s about making automation deployable, affordable, and everyday. The robot that doesn’t exist yet may soon become the most important one of all – not because it’s powerful, but because it’s small enough to be everywhere.