Cleaning Robots in Public Spaces: A Survey and Proposal for Benchmarking Based on Stakeholders Interviews
Raphael Memmesheimer, Martina Overbeck, Bjoern Kral, Lea Steffen, Sven Behnke, Martin Gersch, Arne Roennau
TL;DR
The paper addresses the challenge of deploying autonomous cleaning robots in public spaces and the lack of robust benchmarks capturing real-world conditions. It conducts seven semi-structured expert interviews with municipal and facility managers to uncover requirements and identifies limitations of current hardware and software. Based on these insights, it proposes a park-cleaning benchmarking scenario and platform-agnostic technical requirements to guide development and evaluation. By linking stakeholder needs with benchmarking initiatives and drawing on robotics competitions for motivation, the work lays out a practical, transferable path toward robust outdoor cleaning robots.
Abstract
Autonomous cleaning robots for public spaces have potential for addressing current societal challenges, such as labor shortages and cleanliness in public spaces. Other application domains like autonomous driving, bin picking, or search and rescue have shown that benchmarking platforms and approaches in competitive settings can advance their respective research fields, resulting in more applicable systems under real-world conditions. For this paper, we analyzed seven semi-structured, qualitative stakeholder interviews about outdoor cleaning, identified current needs as well as limitations, and considered those results for the development of a benchmarking scenario based on the previous observations.