Autonomous Commercial Scrubber-Dryers

Executive Summary

Who is patenting autonomous floor-scrubbing machines, how the activity developed 2019–2024, and where the professional cleaning-equipment industry sits in that picture.

A scrubber-dryer wets the floor, scrubs it and takes the dirty liquid straight back up. The classification system says exactly that in one place: the CPC floor-scrubbing groups A47L11/26, A47L11/28 and A47L11/29 with their descendants. Crossing those thirteen codes with the robotic-cleaning indexing scheme A47L2201 — the CPC tag for machines that control their own travel — gives the set this report analyses: 2,766 DOCDB patent families whose earliest filing falls between 2019 and 2024, carried by 5,153 individual applications at 26 patent offices.

Filing activity multiplied in the first half of the window. Families with a first filing rose from 177 in 2019 to 620 in 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 51.9 % over those three years. The two trailing years, 561 and 425, sit inside the ~18-month publication delay and are provisional; no growth statement in this report rests on them.

The geography is lopsided in a way that shapes every other reading. 2,564 of the 2,766 families — 92.7 % — have a member at the Chinese office, against 503 with a WO member, 401 with a US member and 333 with an EP member. The PCT route is used by 18.2 % of families. Between the 2019–2021 and 2022–2024 halves of the window the US share of families fell from 21.8 % to 9.2 % and the WO share from 22.5 % to 15.1 %, while the German office moved the other way, 3.4 % to 4.9 %.

The applicants with the most families in scope are broad-market floor-care and appliance brands: Beijing Roborock with 178 families, Shenzhen Silver Star with 169, Dreame Innovation with 141, Gree Electric with 102. Classification cannot separate a machine sold into an office building from one sold into a living room, so this report adds an explicit, manually assigned layer: 14 manufacturers whose business is professional cleaning equipment or commercial cleaning robots account for 95 families, 3.4 % of the scope. Within that group Gaussian Automation holds 28 families and Alfred Kärcher 21; the remaining twelve hold eight or fewer each. That cohort's annual output stayed inside a narrow band all six years — 11, 17, 21, 19, 15, 12 families.

Two boundaries of the search are worth carrying into any reading of the numbers. The autonomy marker A47L2201 exists only in CPC, and 10,669 of the 18,696 families carrying an IPC floor-scrubbing code in this window hold no CPC assignment at all — they cannot be reached by this profile. And a title search for scrubbing plus autonomy terms returns 562 families outside the classification scope. Both figures are stated with their queries in the Methodology section.

Search Profile

How the 2,766 families were selected, and what each classification layer contributes.

The research question is narrow: which patent families describe floor-scrubbing machines that control their own travel, filed for the first time between 2019 and 2024? Three entry points into the classification scheme were used, and they agree on where the subject lives.

• Catchword index (IPC). WIPO's natural-language index maps „SCRUBBING of floors“ to A47L11/26, A47L11/28 and A47L13/10. The third is a hand implement, not a machine, and stays outside. The same query returns „SCRUBBING of gases“ → B01D47/00, the homonym that a plain keyword search would drag in.
• Title breadcrumb (CPC). SEARCH(title_full, …) on scrubbing, scrubbers, floor cleaning, cleaning floors, cleaning robot and cleaning robots returns the full A47L11 and A47L13 breadcrumb plus A47L2201/028. Singular and plural forms were searched separately and unioned.
• Definition texts (CPC). SEARCH(definition_scope, …) on floor scrubbing, scrubber dryer and floor cleaning machine(s) returns A47L11/00 and A47L23/00 only. For this subject the definition layer confirms the title layer and adds no symbol to it.

The code set

Three seed groups were expanded to their full subtree with a recursive walk on parent, which turns 3 codes into 13:

The autonomy marker is the indexing scheme A47L2201 — „Robotic cleaning machines, i.e. with automatic control of the travelling movement“ — whose recursive subtree contains 8 symbols (/00, /02, /022, /024, /026, /028, /04, /06). A family enters the scope when it carries at least one code from each of the two sets.

Filing Trend 2019–2024

Patent families by their earliest filing year, with the applications those families comprise.

* 2023–2024: incomplete data due to the ~18-month publication delay (PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026, patstat_2026a).

Technology Profile

Where inside the scrubbing branch and inside the robotic indexing scheme the 2,766 families sit.

Adjacent Technologies

CPC subclasses outside A47L that the same families also carry — the technical footprint beyond the cleaning machine itself.

Geographic Analysis

Which offices the 2,766 families reach, and how that footprint moves between the two halves of the window.

Applicant origin

Applicant country is recorded for a minority of the harmonised applicant records in this scope, so the counts below are a lower bound and are given as a table rather than a chart.

Applicant Landscape

Applicants inside the scope, with PATSTAT han_name variants consolidated by name string.

PATSTAT's harmonised applicant name splits several companies across spellings — among the applicants with at least four families, Roborock appears under four han_name forms, Silver Star under four and Yunjing under seven. The counts below consolidate those variants by matching on the distinctive part of the name. The consolidation is deliberately conservative: it merges spellings of the same name and nothing else, so entities that file under a different brand name remain separate rows.

Professional Segment

The manufacturers of professional cleaning equipment and commercial cleaning robots inside the scope, identified by applicant name.

Classification records what a machine is, never who buys it. There is no CPC or IPC code that separates a scrubber-dryer sold into a supermarket from one sold into a kitchen, so the commercial dimension of this subject cannot be read out of the patent classification at all. This section therefore adds an explicit interpretive layer: fourteen applicants whose business is professional cleaning equipment or commercial cleaning robots were assigned by hand, and every family carrying one of them was counted. The rule and its limits are stated in the Methodology section; the assignment is an editorial judgement about companies, not a property of the patent data.

* 2023–2024: incomplete data due to the ~18-month publication delay (PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026, patstat_2026a).

The fourteen applicants

Collaboration

Families filed by more than one applicant, and the applicant pairs that appear on the same application.

Co-applicant pairs are read from the application, not from the family. Pairing applicants that appear anywhere in the same family would match a company with its own name variants filed at different offices and report that as collaboration; joining on appln_id keeps a pair to what two applicants actually signed together.

* 2023–2024: incomplete data due to the ~18-month publication delay (PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026, patstat_2026a).

Applicant pairs

Pairs with at least two joint families, after the exclusions noted below; four further qualifying pairs with two or three joint families are not listed. † Two rows in the query result, split by two han_name spellings of Gree Electric; the two sets of families are disjoint, so the pair covers 5 families in total.

Grant Rates

Share of families with at least one granted member, by the cohort's earliest filing year.

* 2022–2024: grant rates for these cohorts are artificially low because examination is still pending for much of them. The headline rate quoted in this report uses the 2019–2021 cohorts only.

What is being granted

Non-exclusive: a family holding both a patent of invention and a utility model appears in two rows, so the rows sum above 2,766. Design filings were excluded at the application level (appln_kind != 'D'); one family retains a member typed as a design patent under a different application kind.

Methodology

Search strategy, data basis, counting rules and known limitations.

Data basis. This report was produced on 2026-08-15 on EPO PATSTAT Global, Spring 2026 (patstat-mtc.patstat_2026a), with the classification scheme editions IPC 20260101 and CPC 202608 in force. The classification set was completed in three steps before any family was counted: the three seed groups were expanded to their full subtree by a recursive walk on parent (3 codes → 13, and A47L2201/00 → 8), classification predecessors were unioned from the reclassification chain (no predecessor entry exists for either group), and retired symbols were kept unfiltered (neither group contains a retired symbol in IPC or CPC). Every figure in this report comes from a query run against that edition.

Report Files

The complete SQL of this report, including the discovery queries, the frozen scope CTE, the quality-assurance checks and the result of every query, is stored alongside the report as queries.sql. Re-running it against a later PATSTAT edition or a later classification edition will not reproduce these figures exactly, which is why both editions are named at the top of this section and in the file header.