Robot floor scrubbing run per shift for facility contractors, with coverage maps
TL;DR Lustrelane owns and runs autonomous floor-scrubbing robots on large hard floors such as warehouses, airport piers, malls and factory aisles. Facility-management contractors subcontract the floor to it and pay per site per month. Every shift produces a map of what was cleaned, which is the proof site owners keep asking for.
Big floors get cleaned at night by contract crews, and nobody can tell in the morning which aisles were actually done. The contractor bids on headcount and price, attrition is high, and the site owner audits by walking the floor. Costs are also only moving one way.
India's four Labour Codes took effect on 21 November 2025, guaranteeing minimum wages for all workers, adding a National Floor Wage and double overtime for MSME workers[1]. Night shifts on a 2-lakh-sq-ft floor are exactly where overtime piles up.
Robots exist for this. Floor cleaning is the main use within professional cleaning robots, the third-largest professional service robot category globally[2]. What's missing in India is someone who keeps them running site after site.
Lustrelane is an operator, not a robot maker. It buys or leases scrubbers from makers, maps each site, sets routes and schedules, and keeps a technician on call for a cluster of sites. The FM contractor keeps its crew for corners, washrooms and spills, and hands the open floor to the robots.
The product the customer sees is a shift report - a coverage map, square metres done, missed zones with the reason (a pallet in the way, a door shut), water and power used. Missed zones go to the crew's supervisor before the morning shift. Over months the data shows which zones get blocked and when, so routes get re-planned instead of guessed.
To be clear on the rules - Lustrelane does floor cleaning only. It makes no disinfection, sanitisation or infection-control claims.
The seed pitched robots for data-driven sanitisation in commercial spaces. I cut the sanitisation part, because disinfection claims need evidence most robots can't show and the robot buyers already understand is a scrubber.
The payer is the FM contractor, which already holds the cleaning contract and wants a lower cost per square metre with fewer night-shift headaches. In some sites the owner (a warehouse park, a mall, an airport operator) pays directly and asks its contractor to work around the robots. I found no public per-month price for robot cleaning in India. One Pune maker doesn't publish prices and mentions customers starting on rental[3].
Labour Codes in force since November 2025 push up the cost of night shifts[1]. Globally, robots-as-a-service is gaining ground and is already the main model in US logistics robots[2]. An Indian maker with a major airport among its named partners means local hardware and spares are within reach[3].
There's no public figure for India's commercial cleaning-robot market or rental market. The narrowest firm fact is that a Pune company sells autonomous scrubbers to Indian airports and factories[3]. Globally, one US firm that supplies autonomy to scrubber makers, claims 50,000+ robots deployed across six continents[4].
Treat that as proof the category works abroad, not as the size of this market.
The Pune maker builds commercial scrubbers and vacuums in Pune and sells to plants and airports[3]. The US autonomy firm powers scrubbers for large US retailers through established machine makers[4]. A Canadian maker sells its scrubber with remote support and quotes a logistics customer's claim of up to 80% fewer cleaning labour hours[5]. All three sell or rent machines. The gap is an operator that takes responsibility for the floor result across many sites.
| Difficulty | Moderate (42/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹1.4–2.6 Cr |
| Time to launch | 6–9 months |
The robots work. The hard parts are uptime and site fit. Floors with clutter, ramps and changing pallet layouts defeat routes, and a dead robot at 2 a.m. means the contractor's crew is short. You also have to convince FM contractors to cut headcount on a site without losing the contract, which is no easy task.
No sector licence covers robot floor cleaning. The rules that bite are labour law and data, plus radio approval in one case.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI turn coverage data into hygiene or infection-control claims. Lustrelane cleans floors and says nothing about germs.
Want to work out the AI layer for Lustrelane? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I like this for a founder from facility management or warehouse operations who can sell to FM contractors and run field technicians. If you want to build robots then look elsewhere. Prove one number first - 90% or more planned floor area covered per shift across three sites for two months.
Plan for roughly ₹1.4–2.6 Cr over 6–9 months, most of it on buying or leasing scrubbers and setting up a technician team.
No sector licence. Follow the Labour Codes for your staff, get WPC approval if you import robots yourself, and handle any images under the DPDP Act.
Yes, the operator model works wherever facility contractors face rising labour costs. Check local labour and radio rules before you launch.
The free Lustrelane validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the rules checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for contractors and site owners, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Lustrelane or something close to it? The make-or-break work is pricing per site so the FM contractor still earns more than it did with a full crew, and pricing like that is something I work on with founders all the time. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.