Sweeping a 10,000 m² Transit Concourse That Never Closes — A 3-Robot Fleet with an 18-Month Payback

A metropolitan transit interchange put a hard question to us: their concourse never closes, it's always gritty, and the overnight sweep crew was the hardest shift to keep staffed. Could autonomous sweepers hold a 24/7 public floor to standard — and pay for themselves? We ran their real floor plan through the Fleet & ROI Planner. The answer was a three-unit PUDU MT1 Max fleet, sweeping about 10,000 m² a day, with an 18-month payback.

The brief

A station concourse is the opposite of a warehouse floor: it never gets a quiet lock-up, and the dirt is relentless. About 10,000 m² of hard floor — the main concourse, ticket hall, platform approaches, a retail spine and the bus interchange — had to stay clear of tracked-in grit, dust and litter around the clock, with passengers on it every hour of the day.

The constraints were ordinary and unforgiving:

• No overnight window in the usual sense — the busiest zones never fully close; the deep sweep has to fit a short low-traffic lull, with lighter passes through the day around foot traffic.
• Dust and grit, not spills. This is dry-sweep work — a wet scrubber on the open concourse would be the wrong tool. Sealing against dust ingress matters.
• People everywhere. Anything cleaning here has to detect and yield to passengers, and dock itself out of the way to recharge.
• Thresholds and tactile strips. Transit floors are full of edges a small sweeper trips on.

The shortlist

The concourse needs sweeping, so this is dry-sweeper territory — no water, no recovery tank. We sized three genuine sweepers against the same 10,000 m² and the same four-hour overnight deep-sweep window, and on the same basis: each machine's rated coverage derated to a practical figure, applied identically. The MT1 and MT1 Max quote practical cover-mode figures, so they get the ×0.6 derate; the Beetle Pro's 3,240 m²/h is a theoretical maximum, so it gets the tighter ×0.45. No brand sizes off a number the others don't publish.

On the same derated throughput every option is a three-machine fleet — so this isn't a "which is fastest" call, it's a "which survives the environment" call. The PUDU MT1 is the value pick: at ~A$26,000 a unit it sizes the same three machines and pays back soonest. We front the MT1 Max because a 24/7 concourse is exactly where its extras earn out: IP54 dust sealing (the MT1 is IPX3), the seven-hour battery for fewer dock trips across a non-stop day, and 50 mm bump clearance for the thresholds and tactile strips. The Beetle Pro is a capable industrial sweeper, but at a higher unit price with no published sealing figure for a dusty public floor.

The numbers that matter

The fleet math closes cleanly. Sweeping 10,000 m² by hand at 500 m²/h is about 20 crew-hours of open-floor work a day. Each MT1 Max sweeps its ~3,300 m² share at its spec-derated ~1,320 m²/h — under three hours of cleaning, comfortably inside both the four-hour overnight lull and its seven-hour battery, no mid-pass recharge. Three robots, three docks, rolling passes around the clock.

Three MT1 Max units at an indicative ~A$39,200 each (ex-GST) plus multi-zone mapping and commissioning came to about A$122,000 upfront. The robots don't erase the shift — a supervisor and a cleaner still handle bins, escalator landings, stairs, gate lines and the spills a dry sweeper can't — but they displace roughly 6.5 crew-hours a day of open-floor sweeping, about A$228 a day at A$35/hour fully loaded. Across a 30-day month that's about A$6,800.

The pre-deployment estimate was directionally right on labour, but — as always — it understated the value of consistency. A robot sweeps the retail spine at 3am whether or not the last human shift got to it, so audited coverage held up through the morning peak, which is exactly when a stretched manual crew used to fall behind.

Three lessons from the rollout

1. Map for the traffic, not just the floor. The concourse was mapped in zones with time-of-day rules, so the deep sweep runs in the overnight lull and daytime passes stay out of the peak flow.
2. Docks belong in the dead space. Parked in low-traffic bays near each zone, the docks let a robot top up without ever crossing the passenger stream — worth roughly 10% of effective runtime in recovered dead travel.
3. The role becomes supervision. The overnight sweeper operator became a fleet supervisor handling exceptions, bins and the stairs and escalators the robots can't reach — a better job, and the reason the saving is ~A$6,800, not the whole shift.

Would it work for your concourse?

The honest answer is "it depends on your floor area, your traffic pattern and your wage rates" — which is exactly what the planner is for.

• Run your own site through the Fleet & ROI Planner to see the payback on your floor area and shifts.
• Or tell us about your facility and we'll send a vendor-neutral shortlist with indicative pricing.