28th August 2025
Combining innovative robotics with Xsens navigation to deliver smarter and cleaner cities
Introduction
The cleaning industry faces big challenges nowadays: labour shortages, high staff turnover, and increasing demands for consistent hygiene and efficiency. Traditional cleaning methods are heavily dependent on human labour, which represents up to 90% of total cleaning costs. This makes them both expensive and difficult to scale.
Autonomics Tech, a robotics company based in Cyprus, is developing solutions to tackle these issues. Their autonomous sweeping and floor-cleaning robots are designed for facility management companies, offering reliable, scalable, and cost-effective alternatives to manual cleaning crews. At the heart of their navigation system lies the Xsens Vision Navigator (XVN), enabling safe and precise autonomy in complex urban environments.
Autonomics tech develops autonomous sweeping robots. They use the Xsens Vision Navigator for orientation and navigation
About Autonomics
Autonomics is a technology developer and a system integrator. Beyond building their own robots, they help facility management companies integrate diverse robotic cleaning solutions, manage deployments, and provide long-term support.
Their main customers are facility management companies across Europe and beyond. These companies already hold cleaning contracts for airports, shopping malls, office complexes, and city spaces. By adopting Autonomics’ robots, they can reduce costs, scale operations, and maintain high service standards without the limitations of human labour availability.
As Pavel Butov, Founder of Autonomics, explains:
“We are solving the labour shortage problem and helping facility management companies scale. With our robots, cleaning companies can meet demand without relying on unavailable workers.”
Autonomics offers its customers flexible business models: from direct purchase to Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS), making advanced robotics accessible without the need for a heavy upfront investment.
Autonomics’ Sweeping Robots
Autonomics Sweeper
A compact outdoor vacuum cleaning robot, designed from scratch for urban spaces where large sweepers cannot operate.
- Use cases: bicycle lanes, public parks, walking zones, parking areas.
- Performance: up to 30,000 m²/day, replacing entire cleaning crews with a single device.
- Efficiency: compact yet powerful vacuuming system with water-based dust suppression eliminates expensive consumable parts (filters, central broom), saving >$15,000 in five years compared to traditional mechanical sweepers.
- Endurance: over 5 hours of autonomous cleaning per charge.
Autonomics' Vacuum Sweeper in action
Autonomics Combo
A hybrid indoor/outdoor robot capable of both sweeping and floor washing, eliminating the need for pre-sweeping in warehouses, multi-level parking, and industrial environments.
- Use cases: logistics centres, airports, malls, covered parking.
- Dual navigation: switches seamlessly between indoor SLAM and outdoor GNSS+vision navigation.
- Flexibility: cleans inside facilities, then autonomously transitions outdoors to cover parking zones or neighbouring warehouses.
Autonomics' Combo can do sweeping + floor washing
The Challenges of Autonomous Outdoor Cleaning
These are great products, solving real-world problems, but their development and deployment comes with challenges, especially in how to handle the robots’ orientation and navigation. This is because autonomous outdoor cleaning is uniquely difficult, for a couple of reasons:
- Open areas (parks, parking lots, walking zones) require high-precision GNSS/RTK positioning.
- Urban zones (near buildings, under trees, covered parking) often degrade or block GNSS signals, making navigation unreliable.
- Mixed environments (indoor facilities + surrounding outdoor areas) demand seamless switching between indoor SLAM-based navigation and outdoor GNSS-based navigation.
Autonomous outdoors cleaning comes with multiple navigation challenges
Why the Xsens Vision Navigator (XVN)
For autonomous outdoor cleaning, navigation is a tough challenge: GNSS alone is not reliable enough in urban environments, while vision-only systems struggle in open areas.
The Xsens Vision Navigator (XVN) solves this problem by combining RTK-GNSS with vision-based navigation in one integrated solution.
For Autonomics Tech, this hybrid approach is essential:
- Urban reliability: XVN maintains precise positioning even when GNSS signals are degraded by tall buildings or dense tree cover.
- Open-area accuracy: In wide, open zones like parking areas or bicycle lanes, XVN leverages RTK-GNSS to keep the robot on course.
- Seamless transitions: Autonomics’ Combo robot can move from indoor environments to outdoor areas, with XVN ensuring a smooth handover to GNSS+vision navigation.
- Consistency for customers: Facility management companies can deploy robots in diverse scenarios, from warehouses to public parks, knowing navigation will remain reliable.
For facility management companies, this means fewer failures, lower supervision costs, and the confidence to deploy robots in public areas.
As Pavel Butov, Founder of Autonomics, explains:
“The XVN is the only technology on the market that combines GPS RTK and vision-based navigation. For outdoor scenarios, this is unique, and we really need it for our robots.”
By enabling dependable autonomy in such varied environments, XVN is not just a navigation tool, as it makes Autonomics’ robots commercially viable at scale. Without it, the sweeping and combo robots could not reliably deliver the cost savings, scalability, and consistency that facility management companies demand.
The Xsens XVN (Vision Navigator) was selected for Autonomic's sweeping robots because of its unique ability to combine GNSS + RTK and Vison-based navigation
Looking at the Future
With certification completed and initial deployments underway, Autonomics Tech is scaling across Europe and exploring the Middle East market. Looking ahead, they see the potential for XVN-powered navigation in other service robotics, from last-mile delivery to precision agriculture.
As Pavel notes:
“Technically, all robots designed for outdoor usage need reliable navigation, and this is exactly what Xsens can provide.”
Conclusion
Autonomics Tech, with Xsens’ help, is reshaping the cleaning industry. By combining innovative robotic platforms with the Xsens Vision Navigator, they deliver cost-effective, scalable, and reliable cleaning automation.
The result: smarter, cleaner cities, and a glimpse into the future of service robotics.
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