Cleaning Robot CL02

CL02 is the cleaning robot of CYBERDYNE, the Tsukuba company otherwise known for the HAL exoskeletons. It is not a household vacuum: a 620 x 480 x 470 mm machine weighing 63 kg with its battery, built to vacuum the corridors, lobbies and open-plan floors of office buildings, hospitals and railway stations. One charge covers a maximum of 3,000 square metres in roughly two hours of work, and dust goes into a paper bag rather than a bin the operator has to empty by hand. The point of the machine is what does not have to be installed for it to work. CYBERDYNE took over an earlier cleaning robot system in 2013 and rebuilt it around navigation that needs neither magnetic tape nor guide wires laid in the floor — a laser scanner and an in-house 3D camera build the map. Routes are set either by driving the robot around once (a teaching-playback pass) or by letting it generate the cleaning path itself, and everything is operated from a tablet. When a job finishes the robot returns a map of where the dust actually was, which turns cleaning into something a facility manager can look at as data. Two options change what the robot is. A disinfection unit sprays disinfectant onto handrails and benches and adds a UV lamp; with it fitted the robot grows to 970 mm tall. A separate elevator interface lets it call a lift and move between floors on its own. The disinfection version was picked up for public demonstrations during the pandemic years — it was shown at Tokyo Robot Collection and certified under the local Tsukuba Quality scheme — and a wiper-cleaning variant was later adopted in a Kanagawa Prefecture robot deployment programme. CYBERDYNE does not publish a price and does not sell or rent the machine to individuals; deployment has gone through partners, most visibly a March 2018 agreement with Sumitomo Corporation to put CL02 into group office buildings in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. The manufacturer also gives no release date, so the year in this profile is an upper bound: the product page is present in the earliest web archive snapshot of the site, from 16 February 2018.

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