(Yicai) Dec. 4 -- China's Cowa Robot has deployed 36 automated cleaning machines in Shenzhen's Shijing sub-district, covering an area of about 2.7 million square meters.

The sanitation robots have been undertaking cleaning operations on sidewalks, street corners, and even roads for some time already, a Cowa staffer told Yicai. They immediately start operating as soon as they detect fallen tree leaves or trash in the streets, Yicai observed.

"The capabilities required for sanitation robots are far from simple," Wang Yu, executive president of Cowa's Shenzhen subsidiary, told Yicai. That is because garbage is not a uniformly definable category of material, it has no fixed shape or stable boundaries, placing extremely high demands on the generalization ability of artificial intelligence models, he explained.

Training models with real-world data to enable robots to identify garbage is only the first step, Wang said, adding that the complexity and uncertainty of real environments mean that robots cannot rely solely on recognition results to act. They must also know how to handle the garbage they encounter and find their own solutions.

"Sanitation robots must not only see garbage but also understand the relationship between garbage and the ground, including material, humidity, and adhesion," Wang noted. "Then, they need to adjust their actions accordingly."

Cowa's orders mainly come from local governments, according to Wang. Shenzhen's goal is to reduce manual labor input by three to five people for each deployed sanitation robot, with strict assessments on implementation.

The annual cost of a sanitation worker in Shenzhen is about CNY70,000 (USD9,870), Yicai learned from an outsourcing agency. This means that deploying a cleaning robot to replace three workers is worthwhile if the product's annual operating cost does not exceed CNY200,000 (USD28,210).

Robots are not expected to fully replace workers, as the goal is to realize human-robot collaboration, rather than full replacement, Liao Wenlong, chief technology officer of Cowa, told Yicai. This would shift manual work from repetitive tasks to assistance, inspection, and completing cleaning tasks that robots cannot yet handle.

"For example, picking up garbage from greenways, cleaning residues in trash cans, or removing wall posters are unconventional cleaning tasks that still require manual completion," Liao explained.

Initially, one worker was responsible for cleaning 1 kilometer of sidewalks per day, but now, one worker and a robot can jointly handle 7 to 8 km of sidewalks, a Cowa staffer working in Shijing told Yicai.

As domestic projects gradually enter the stage of large-scale operation, sanitation robot makers have begun attempting to expand their business overseas. Wang said that Cowa is exploring entering the Singaporean market and is planning to launch commercial trials in some foreign regions, such as Abu Dhabi.

"These regions have the basic conditions for using sanitation robots in terms of labor costs, urban scale, and governance models," Wang noted.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione