Trusted, Integrated Robotic Solutions for Schools and Higher Education

Provide students and faculty with a cleaner, healthier environment for study, and support higher cognitive function.

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A cleaner, healthier environment for study. Streamlined operations for custodial staff.

For school faculty, students, and their parents, establishing a consistently high standard of cleanliness is paramount to facilitating healthy, safe, and productive learning environments. Unfortunately, however, janitorial and maintenance staffing challenges, inconsistent service quality, and the continued failure to meet quality expectations puts educational institutions at risk of failing their standard operating procedures (SOPs). These complications are further compounded by repetitive, dull, and at times dangerous maintenance tasks, which can directly affect the rate of on-the-job injuries, employee engagement, and productivity at large. 

As increasing operational expenses add new pressures to educational facility management teams, the challenge becomes finding a solution that addresses labor roadblocks, optimizes existing resources and productivity, and motivates cleaning teams — without straying outside of the budget. 

Integrated solutions such as Whiz, the robot vacuum for schools, and Scrubber 50 Pro, the robotic floor scrubber, answer the call by enabling your custodial staff to provide a consistent, superior quality clean. From vacuuming carpeted hallways, libraries, or office buildings to scrubbing hard-floored areas such as sports facilities and common areas, our best-in-class solutions allow custodial teams to offload these repetitive, yet critical, tasks and instead focus their efforts on higher value-based services that will enhance the student experience. Your students will love to watch our robots at work, too! 

Schools and higher education facilities benefit from optimized operations as a result of SoftBank Robotics’ solutions:

Up to 25%

more team efficiency through the automation of repetitive cleaning tasks

Up to 8x

less airborne dust and allergens compared to manual vacuuming

Up to 50%

more time to devote to deep cleaning
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Improved ranking among other educational facilities

Case Study: How Wicomico County Schools Optimized Their Cleaning Operations

Since deploying two Whiz robots at an elementary school and administrative building in 2022, Wicomico County Schools has achieved:

  • 250 hours per month saved in their facilities
  • 2.1 million square feet of floor space vacuumed
  • $5.70 hourly vacuum rate
  • 2x improvement in overall cleanliness

Discover how Whiz helped Wicomico County Schools focus on higher-impact areas and higher value tasks and discover how you can do the same.

Download The Case Study Here

Cultivate safe, healthy, and productive learning environments.

1. Superior quality and “always up to date”

Schools and higher education facilities demand superior quality and consistency of services to uphold the student experience, keep occupants healthy, and encourage productive learning environments. Our commercial-grade solution allows custodial teams to execute tasks more effectively with a robotics system that is always “up to date.” Designed with industry-leading AI capabilities, including responsive navigation in a range of environments and an operating system that updates in the background, our service robotics deliver continuous performance improvement without interrupting operations.

Our goal is to enable your school staff to work in tandem alongside robotic solutions with minimal supervision, helping you achieve 100% of the tasks required to meet SOPs and cover the dull, repetitive, and time-consuming work. In the meantime, your janitorial teams can prioritize higher-value activities that will help you meet the growing expectations of students, parents, teachers, and maintenance staff alike.

2. Visible and documented proof of service

Gain greater confidence in your cleaning regimen and see proof of service with near real-time, data-driven reporting. Our service robotics are fully integrated through our proprietary data and reporting platform, SoftBank Robotics Connect, to document their progress while they run and help you make smarter, more informed decisions to achieve SOPs, whether you’ve integrated a single robot or have scaled to an entire fleet.  

Plus, because our robots can run during study hours, they provide further visibility to students and faculty of your unwavering commitment to excellent service and learning experiences.

3. Certainty from guaranteed fixed costs

Take advantage of guaranteed fixed costs for a set timeframe — including repairs at no cost to you. Our fixed-expense approach helps education management and leadership teams anticipate budgetary needs, plan with greater accuracy, and mitigate the unexpected resource shifts that come with variable costs. Alleviate the pressures of rising operational expenses, improve your school rankings and reputation, and improve your confidence in the cleaning services you deploy.

4. Higher-value activity focus

SoftBank Robotics’ solutions help schools and educational facilities optimize their existing labor forces and productivity within the confines of their available budget. Once deployed, our solutions autonomously execute tedious and time-consuming services that are imperative to achieving SOPs. That means your custodial staff has more time for higher-value activities, which are critical to meeting cleanliness and hygiene standards, attracting grant money and prospective students, and engaging alumni. Students and faculty also appreciate and benefit from cleaner, healthier environments for study.

5. Return on student and faculty experience

Students and faculty enjoy seeing the robotic solutions at work. They differentiate your school or higher education facility, and you can balance the most appropriate use of technology with the best way to engage and retain your custodial and janitorial teams. 

With visible proof that your students and faculty are in a clean and healthy environment, you can benefit from improved student experience and rankings, which leads to enhanced reputation and ultimately attracts more students and faculty members.

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Why SoftBank Robotics?

Your success is our success!
Leading education facilities trust our integrated, robotic solutions.

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Market Leader

As part of the largest technology fund in the world, our depth of robotic experience, research, and knowledge leads the market with over 35,000 robotic solutions successfully deployed in service industries globally.

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Focus on Service Up-Time

With white glove services, including onboarding, deployment, operations reviews, and a world-class on-call technical support structure, our market-leading integrated, robotic solutions can be adopted quickly and successfully in virtually any facility.

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Proven Business Value with Risk Mitigation

Industry standard-setting methodologies drive the adoption of collaborative robots and deliver proven business value, guaranteed (subject to requirements).

Improve operational efficiency with data-driven solutions.

Our proprietary data and reporting platform, SoftBank Robotics Connect, is constantly gathering data from its integrated robots as they clean. It stores information about routes followed, assists needed, runtime, and other insights in the cloud. Access data via SBR Connect in near real-time to guide reporting and optimization opportunities. 

The SBR Connect dashboard is also your entry point to efficiently managing a broader robotics ecosystem. Custodial staff managers can operate a fleet of robots across schools and higher education facilities through a single cloud-based interface. From the dashboard, users can effectively manage their fleets, while managers can track ROI.

Health Industry Data

Guide: The Business Case for Commercial Cleaning Robots in Higher Education

In this guide for educational facility leaders, you’ll discover:

  • How automated cleaning programs can increase team productivity by up to 25%.
  • The five pillars to consider when crafting a business case.
  • The “hidden” benefits of automated cleaning.

Get the Guide

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Resources to enable more efficient and effective education facility cleaning:

Blog: 5 New Technologies in Education Transforming School Operations

Learn how new technologies like remote learning platforms, big data, and AI are changing the way students learn (and the way schools are managed).

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Blog: 4 Solutions to School Janitorial Staffing Challenges

In this blog, we explore some of the most common challenges school janitorial staff face, and how to address these challenges effectively.

Read Article

Blog: How To Create Effective Cleaning Operations for Schools

As cleaning technologies have evolved over the past several years, cleaning operations have taken a giant leap forward, making it easier than ever for schools to achieve high cleaning standards.

Read Article

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I optimize cleaning operations, both in K-12 and higher education?

Improving your existing cleaning operations and maintenance procedures requires a multi-pronged approach that includes a routine, thorough cleaning regimen, compliance with state health policies for educational facilities, and well-documented cleaning procedures for essential tasks, such as floor upkeep, general maintenance, mold and pest elimination, air quality, and hazardous material containment. 

Collaborative service robotics can extend the reach of your current janitorial and maintenance teams by tackling time-consuming tasks, such as vacuuming, sweeping, and floor scrubbing. With more time at their disposal, your team will be better equipped to tackle high-value cleaning duties that help students and faculty stay safe, healthy, and focused on learning.

How can I improve cleaning productivity for primary, secondary, and higher education facilities?

Janitor burnout, labor shortages, and insufficient training all jeopardize cleaning productivity for educational institutions of all types and sizes. To combat these roadblocks and further boost productivity, some school maintenance teams have turned to technology, such as service robotics. 

By taking on dull, repetitive duties, a well-executed and fully integrated robotics program decreases employee burnout and further frees up time to prioritize higher value and more engaging tasks. Service robotics also help fill any gaps in your current janitor roster and provide human staff with new, exciting training opportunities to learn how to operate and work alongside collaborative robots.

How can I meet and optimize SOPs with limited cleaning resources for my educational facility?

Before educational maintenance leaders can satisfy and surpass their SOPs, they must first benchmark their current performance and identify performance patterns where their current-state operations fall short. Depending on the reasons why they do not currently meet SOPs, custodial teams should then brainstorm ways to set up their people for success, through additional training, smarter resource allocation, and improved cleaning equipment — such as service robotics. 

Equipped with near real-time performance monitoring, these solutions offer a more sophisticated evaluation of cleaning performance, which enables management teams to make data-driven decisions that further elevate their operating procedures.

How can I control the cost of cleaning operations at my educational facility?

For many educational institutions, the answer to the question of increasing cleaning expenses is automation. Time-intensive cleaning activities, such as mopping, sweeping, and vacuuming, quickly become a significant drain on resources and budget over time — especially at scale. Automated solutions like cleaning service robotics are a fixed-cost item in your list of expenses, meaning they are easier to anticipate and control within tight budgets.

How can I more accurately plan and forecast for essential cleaning services at my educational facility?

In the increasingly technology-driven world of facility management, forecasting the resources, equipment, and budget required to keep learning spaces clean will rely on data and analytics. While it is possible to monitor and track your historical process manually, leveraging services that automatically collect and report on data will streamline the process, reduce risk of human error, and provide additional visibility into your cleaning activities.

Ready to automate and optimize your operations?

Your success is our success!

Schedule a call with our team of experts and explore how our proven, industry-leading robotics adoption program and associated solutions can help your organization.