For Chinese consumers who have a “hot water complex”, hot water is naturally associated with “sterilization” and “decontamination”: hot water dishwashers, hot water washing machines, and consumers are also accustomed to using hot water to deal with grease and stubborn stains in household cleaning; and steam is a deeper cleaning method than hot water. In some application scenarios that require higher decontamination and sterilization, such as water, some home appliances are also configured with steam cleaning functions, such as steam floor washing machines.
Some floor washing machines on the market are equipped with hot water or steam floor washing functions, but they have never appeared in sweeping robots. Handheld floor washing machines can achieve high-temperature floor washing, but they rely on manual operation. Why can’t sweeping robots that focus on freeing hands break through the shackles of deep cleaning?
Floor scrubbers have enough space to set up steam generation chambers independently, and the impact on other functional modules is relatively small, but sweeping robots are different – the small body has already highly integrated multiple modules such as laser radar, roller brush, water tank, battery, etc. If a high-temperature steam module is stuffed in, it will not only be difficult to achieve in terms of space structure, but also easily affect the core cleaning ability. It is extremely difficult to achieve “smart convenience + high-temperature cleaning” on sweeping robots at the same time.
However, Zhidongxi was pleasantly surprised to find that some cleaning robot brands are making every effort to overcome technical difficulties, striving to break the technical barriers that cannot be achieved at the same time, such as freeing hands and deep cleaning. 3i, the dark horse in the field of sweeping robots, unveiled the 3i Cleaning Station F1 Pro at this year’s AWE. It “stuffed” steam hot water floor cleaning technology into a sweeping robot for the first time, challenging the space compression limit of high-temperature cleaning, and officially opened a “steam hot water revolution” for sweeping robots.
This is a difficult challenge: how to integrate a high-temperature steam module into a compact sweeping robot? And how to make it complete deep cleaning at the level of a floor scrubber in automatic cruising? Zhidongxi had an in-depth dialogue with the product manager of 3i Cleaning Station F1 Pro to further understand the key technologies behind this cleaning revolution. It can be predicted that a new battle on the automation and cleaning power of cleaning robots has already begun.
The steam hot water floor washing function has been available on floor washing machines for a long time, but it has not been seen on sweeping robots for a long time. The most intuitive reason is that the two have completely different shapes.
Handheld floor washing machines adopt the “vertical grip + three-dimensional open cavity” design. This longitudinal space allows the steam generation chamber to be independently set in the middle and upper part of the machine body, and the bottom cleaning module and the steam ejection port can maintain a long distance to avoid high temperature damage to the motor and other functional modules. And because it relies on manual operation, users’ requirements for floor washing machines are mostly simple-it is enough to complete deep cleaning and thorough sterilization and decontamination.
However, users have completely different expectations for sweeping robots: they must be able to flexibly drill into low areas such as the bottom of sofas and tables, achieve long-term coverage of the entire house, have autonomous obstacle avoidance and self-cleaning capabilities, and be able to identify different scenes and adopt different cleaning strategies, integrating portability, lightweight, and intelligence.
Therefore, within the body height of the sweeping robot of about 10cm, modules such as laser radar, roller brush, dust box, water tank, and battery have been highly integrated. If a high-temperature steam module is embedded, the space for other functional modules will undoubtedly be greatly compressed, which will have an adverse effect on the operation of the sweeping robot as a whole and the cleaning capabilities of other dimensions.
There is a clear difference between the use scenarios of sweeping robots, which are all-round but have a certain upper limit on cleaning effect, and floor scrubbers: floor scrubbers focus on deep cleaning of stubborn stains such as solidified oil stains and mold, but the process is a bit tiring; mainstream sweeping robots focus on cleaning dust and hair, liquid stains, light oil stains, etc., and stubborn stains still require users to handle them twice.
In this case, most users have to form a dual-device mode of “daily maintenance of sweeping robots + regular cleaning of floor scrubbers”.
Therefore, the 3i engineering team has been thinking about how to create a completely different sweeping robot product that is both convenient and intelligent, and can achieve the deep cleaning ability of floor scrubbers? The key to solving the problem is to satisfy the “technical greed” of having both, and to break through the technical barriers of steam hot water washing technology in stacking and compatibility design.
Facing the long-standing technical barriers of sweeping robots, 3i, as a highly potential innovator in the industry, has promoted sweeping robots to break through the boundaries of “daily maintenance” through a series of pioneering technologies such as steam hot water washing technology, and evolved towards deep cleaning and fully automatic closed-loop, which is truly more convenient than floor scrubbers and cleaner than traditional sweeping robots.
This may be the beginning of a “steam and hot water revolution” for cleaning robots, which will promote the reconstruction of the traditional paradigm of the industry, allowing the two completely different categories of sweeping robots and floor scrubbers to merge, helping users to be freed from the tediousness of manually operating floor scrubbers for deep cleaning. This is not an innovation in the general sense, but a disruptive innovation that exists frequently in real life and can be truly felt by users. For the extremely inward-looking sweeping robot industry, a new and vibrant market growth opportunity is also brewing.
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