Whiz: a commercial cleaning robot that cleans alone once staff teach it the route

A cleaning robot that sold 10,000 units in just over a year

Whiz is a commercial vacuum-cleaning robot from SoftBank Robotics. It was announced on 19 November 2018 as the company’s second robot after Pepper. Yicai reported that a Chinese manufacturer made the body. The navigation software is Brain Corp’s BrainOS. Staff push the robot by hand along a cleaning route once, and after that it cleans alone. It stores up to 600 routes and alerts staff by pager when it meets a problem it cannot resolve. It runs about three hours on a charge. Sales began in Japan in May 2019, then reached Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore in September and the US in November. It was sold on a monthly subscription: in Singapore S$499 a month plus S$100 for maintenance (before tax), and in the US from $499 a month.

From Whiz i to three new products in 2026

SoftBank Robotics announced that it had sold more than 6,000 units by the end of March 2020 and more than 10,000 by the end of June. It cited growing concern about facility cleanliness and a push to shift cleaning from people to robots. It also claimed the top global share in sales of commercial vacuum-type autonomous cleaning robots, based on Grand View Research data. A new Whiz i followed in October 2020. Under specific test conditions its suction was up to 1.6 times higher, its dust tray held 6.3 L, and the Japanese price was ¥39,000 a month on a 3-year contract (before tax). In May 2026 the company announced three products: Whiz P, Whiz B and Whiz V. It said it develops, designs and quality-controls all three in Japan and keeps their operating data in Japan. It says Whiz-series shipments worldwide exceed 40,000. We could not confirm how that figure is counted.

42 hotels planned, and eight robots in one hospital

In June 2019 a SoftBank newsletter reported that the cleaning company Daiichi Kigyo had introduced Whiz at the end of May and expected to cut floor-cleaning time by about 25%. The manager said he mastered it quickly because he only had to walk and push it along the area to be cleaned. In February 2020 Newswitch reported that Richmond Hotels would introduce Whiz in all 42 of its facilities in Japan. The aims were to save cleaning labour, cut costs and even out quality, with a decision on expansion to follow use until June. From February 2023 a cleaning company at Ichinomiya Nishi Hospital in Aichi ran eight Whiz i units for an average of about five hours a day. The 30 to 40 minutes per floor that ward mopping used to take is now spent on other cleaning tasks (case material from sales partner Iris Ohyama). In July 2020 Kim Dong-hyup of SoftBank Robotics told The Korea Times: “We don't think we can replace human labor with our Whiz robot vacuum.” He added: “Instead, we are aiming to lessen the human workload.” Korea had then run 67 proof-of-concept trials over six months in 36 offices, 18 hotels, six shopping malls and three hospitals.

A robot with its teacher standing by

Whiz concentrates on one job, vacuuming floors. A person teaches it the route first, and it calls staff by pager when it is stuck. The benefit that adopting sites cited was not removing people but cutting cleaning time and redirecting it to other work. Yicai described Whiz as a change of direction from Pepper, which was built to recognise emotions and interact with people. It is notable that a robot that helps with the work rather than talking has now been sold for seven years. Most of the figures above, though, come from the company and its partners.

When this robot learns the job in a new place, who is standing beside it to teach it?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Sales of the original Whiz alone, and how the 40,000 Whiz-series figure is counted
• Whether the original Whiz is still sold and supported
• Evidence of the effects of adoption from sources other than the company or its partners
• The country of manufacture and the role of ICE Robotics (reports describe them differently)