Toilet-Cleaning Robots: How Much of a Janitor's Restroom Work They Actually Do

The job, and why the toilet is the hard part

O*NET, the US Labor Department's occupation database, describes janitors and cleaners as people who "keep buildings in clean and orderly condition", under job titles such as custodian, building services worker and school custodian. Of the occupation's 21 tasks, "Service, clean, or supply restrooms" and "Gather and empty trash" share the highest importance rating, 81 out of 100. The occupation employed 2,432,600 people in the United States in 2025, at a median wage of $17.71 an hour, and is projected to grow "slower than average (1% to 2%)" between 2025 and 2035, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data shown on O*NET.¹ That projection isn't a forecast about robots.

Floors were automated first because they are flat and open. Japan's labour ministry, in its 2025 plan for labour-saving investment in building maintenance, says cleaning robots automatically clean "mainly large, flat areas" such as corridors and lobbies, so that "cleaning staff can focus on more difficult cleaning work (toilets, and places with steps)". It adds that "automation technology for difficult cleaning work is still developing", and its table lists toilets as an area with "few practical technologies".²³ Walmart used the same split when it introduced robotic floor scrubbers in 2018: "Instead of riding the scrub machine, a Walmart associate can be tidying restrooms".²⁰ Tork, which sells restroom dispensers and sensors, says "up to 40% of cleaning time in offices and large venues is spent on the restroom", citing a 2024 BCG discussion rather than a published study.²²

A toilet-cleaning robot is therefore a different machine from a floor scrubber. The current designs put a robot arm on a mobile base. The arm swaps tool heads to brush, spray, vacuum, dry and disinfect fixtures of different shapes, and the base drives from cubicle to cubicle on its own. Japanese companies call these robots "physical AI", a form of embodied AI: makers say the robot uses cameras and a learned model to find dirt and plan its movements, rather than replaying a fixed path.³⁷¹⁸

The one fixture-cleaning robot with a year of live work

Hangzhou Xingwuzhong Robot, founded in 2023 in Hangzhou's Linping district, makes the Star X2. According to Hangzhou Daily's news site, a cleaner at the Tashan public toilet in Yuhang district had worked with the robot for a year by September 2026. Before, "the related cleaning work took about 3 hours". Now the robot takes "high-frequency, repetitive cleaning tasks such as toilets and washbasins", while the cleaner gives it work orders and does "deeper cleaning such as mirrors, walls and windows", and the whole job takes "about an hour and a half". The cleaner's verdict was: "I give it 7 points, myself 3; together we make 10." The same report says "more than 100" of the robots work in public toilets across Hangzhou, and that the company signed orders for 1,500 robots at the Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou in September 2026.²

Caiwen, a financial news site, reported "nearly 1,500" robots ordered by six partners, among them China Mobile's Shunde branch, Midea Real Estate and Country Garden Services. It also described the division of labour. A company partner said cleaners act as the robots' "administrators": they dispatch tasks by phone or on a timer, and "when the robot hits an abnormal situation such as a blocked toilet, it reports back and a person steps in".³ The time saving is one cleaner's account, not a measured study, and neither outlet names the organisation that runs the Tashan toilet or gives a price.

Japan's pilots: an office building and a station

In August 2026, Nippon Steel Kowa Real Estate and the data-science firm JDSC began what they called Japan's first office-building pilot of Loki, a toilet-cleaning robot made by the Zurich start-up Loki Robotics. The robot runs in the developer's own office building, testing "fit with Japanese building environments and toilet specifications, operations, and the remote-operation set-up". SoftBank Robotics supplies the robot and runs its remote operation.⁴ Loki Robotics says it combines "end-to-end learning with teleoperation",⁷ and innovatopia noted that the building, the number of robots, the trial period, the cost, and how far the robot works alone rather than under remote control had not been published.⁵ At a July 2026 demonstration the robot brushed a toilet bowl with a special brush fitted to its hand, and SoftBank Robotics said it was considering using Loki in its own cleaning services, aiming for around spring 2027.⁶

On October 16, 2026, JR East, JR East Shoji and SoftBank Corp. announced a station-cleaning trial centred on Akabane Station in Tokyo, running from October 27 to mid-January 2027. Sensors on restrooms and bins will measure use, a camera will test AI detection of mess on the concourse, and "inside the restrooms, a physical AI cleaning robot will be tested". The robot's trial runs happen after the last train.⁸ The announcement doesn't name the robot. The JR East release couldn't be fetched, so we cite Business+IT's report of it; Business+IT is published by a SoftBank group company.

The longest-running restroom robot we found in Japan cleans only the floor. NEXCO Central, which operates expressways in central Japan, had its maintenance subsidiary put a CLINABO robot made by Nippon Signal into the restrooms at the Hamamatsu service area on July 9, 2021. It cleans the lobby and aisle floors, not the cubicles, and NEXCO expected it to cut total restroom cleaning time "by about 10%". NEXCO said its staff clean under and behind urinals "in a cramped posture, shining a hand mirror", and that it was developing robots for urinals, cubicles and accessible toilets; we found no later announcement about them.⁹

What makers say, and what they haven't shown

Most toilet-cleaning robots outside China and Japan are known only through their makers' and investors' statements. Hivebotics, a Singapore spin-off from the National University of Singapore, raised a US$6 million Series A in September 2026. Its lead investor said the money "will take Hivebotics' robot, Abluo, from pilot deployments into volume production", that Abluo cleans "toilets, urinals, sinks and floors" with "high-pressure steam, a targeted chemical jet, vacuum extraction and a blow-drying stage", and that it "has logged nearly 10,000 operating hours over 12 months of use across more than 20 sites" in four regions. No site is named.¹¹ When The Straits Times reported Abluo's trials in 2023, the robot worked "under the watchful eye of a human cleaner, who first inspects the toilet's condition and carries out tasks the robot cannot yet do".¹²

Primech AI, part of the Nasdaq-listed Singapore cleaning contractor Primech Holdings, said in November 2024 that its HYTRON robot was in use at Temasek Polytechnic,¹³ and in May 2025 that it had begun a two-year lease at "one of Singapore's premier lifestyle and shopping destinations", which it didn't name.¹⁴ We found no statement from the polytechnic or from any other operator. Primech Holdings describes itself as a provider of "technology-driven facilities services" in Singapore, so it is a cleaning contractor as well as the robot's maker.

Somatic, a New York company, publishes the only list prices we found: "$1,500 / month" for "8 hours / day weekdays", up to $4,500 for 16 hours every day, which it works out at "hourly $8.63". Its product page lists "Toilets, urinals, floors, open doors, pick up trash, refill water & chemicals".¹⁵ In 2023 its CEO told Popular Science that "restocking consumables (paper towels, toilet paper, and soap) and taking the trash out still require local staff input", and the same article quoted a critic who said the demonstration video showed the robot "only going over clean bathrooms".¹⁶ Somatic named "a FAANG company" among a handful of customers in 2020 but not which one.¹⁷ In Korea, Atomix Robotics unveiled POMODO, which cleans toilets, urinals, sinks, mirrors and floors and writes an AI report after each job; the company's own simulation says 20 restrooms would recover an investment of about ₩100 million within three years.¹⁸

In the lab

Research shows how hard the task still is for general-purpose robots. Stanford researchers' BEHAVIOR Robot Suite set a wheeled two-armed robot a "clean the toilet" activity: pick up a sponge, open the cover, clean the seat, close and wipe the cover, then press the flush. Their learned policy completed the whole sequence in 8 of 15 trials (53%), against 61% (100 of 164) for skilled people teleoperating the same robot.¹⁹ Wiping a seat isn't scrubbing a soiled bowl, and the trials ran in a lab restroom, so this is a prototype result.

Around the toilet: floors, sensors and self-cleaning cabins

The parts of restroom work that are automated in production are mostly around the toilet, not in it. Robotic floor scrubbers are routine in big retailers: Brain Corp said in 2020 that Sam's Club would add 372 Tennant T7AMR scrubbers, "resulting in a robotic scrubber in every club" in its US chain of nearly 600 stores.²¹ These are autonomous mobile robots, but Walmart's first ones needed "adult supervision (an associate has to prep the area and map the machine's route)".²⁰ The International Federation of Robotics counted 44,644 professional cleaning robots installed in 2025, from its survey of producers, with "floor cleaning as the main application".²⁵

Sensor systems change when restrooms get cleaned rather than who cleans them. Tork Vision Cleaning puts sensors in dispensers and people counters to "notify cleaners when dispensers require refills and how many users have entered a restroom". Tork says it has "more than 100,000 connected devices" sending "more than 1.3 million messages a day to cleaners". In the same release, the facilities director of a Paris headquarters managed by Sodexo said 1,300 devices "led to up to 90% fewer complaints".²² That's AI assisting cleaners, not replacing any task.

Two older kinds of automation never needed a robot arm. Airport Authority Hong Kong said in April 2020 that an "Intelligent Sterilization Robot" with an ultraviolet light and air sterilizer was "deployed round-the-clock in public toilets and key operating areas", able to "sterilize up to 99.99% of bacteria in its vicinity" in 10 minutes, by its own account.¹⁰ And Paris's 435 public sanisettes clean and disinfect the toilet in thirty seconds after each use; even so, the city says its contractor "will intervene, on average, three times a week on each sanitizer" to supply consumables, clean, empty bins and repair parts.²⁴

What the evidence does and doesn't show

Measured against the janitor's core tasks, robots do two in production at some sites: the floors, through autonomous scrubbers, and the toilets and basins themselves, through about a hundred Star X2 robots in Hangzhou's public toilets. Everywhere else, toilet-cleaning robots are pilots, lab results or vendor claims, and the pilots that operators confirm all started in 2026. In every case we found, a person still restocks paper and soap, handles blockages, cleans what the robot can't reach, or checks the result.

None of the operators here has linked a restroom robot to job cuts, and the sources frame the robots as an answer to a shortage of cleaners rather than a surplus. Japan's labour ministry says the job-openings-to-applicants ratio for building cleaning has stayed between about 2.0 and 3.0, and that 57.9% of building-cleaning workers were aged 60 or over in the 2020 census.²³ Singapore treats restroom cleaning as its own rung on the cleaning sector's Progressive Wage Model: a full-time outsourced restroom cleaner in an office, school or hospital must earn at least S$2,495 a month in basic wages from July 2026, against S$2,080 for a general cleaner.²⁶ Those are the stated contexts, not measured effects of the robots, and no source in this post has measured what toilet-cleaning robots do to the number of cleaners.