Floor Care For Electrical Distribution Centers: Automating The Work Around Your AS/RS

Electrical distributors are spending heavily on automation. Van Meter is adding 124,000 sq ft and Hai Robotics automation to its Cottage Grove, MN distribution center. Codale, a Sonepar company, opened an AutoStore-equipped distribution center (DC) in Las Vegas in October 2025.

Those systems automate storage and picking, the work of an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS). The floor they sit on still gets cleaned the old way: an associate, a broom or a ride-on machine, and whatever time is left after receiving and counter traffic. This article covers where that time goes and how autonomous scrubbers take it back.

1. Where Floor Care Eats Hours On A Distribution Floor

Floor care on an electrical distribution floor concentrates in four zones:

• Receiving docks: packaging, pallet debris, banding, and dust after every truck.
• Main DC aisles: long runs between racking with steady forklift and order-picker traffic.
• Cut rooms: wire and cable offcuts, reel dust, and shavings around the cutting stations.
• Staging and will-call: the areas customers, drivers, and contractors see first.

Each zone gets cleaned when someone has time. On a busy day, that is late, partial, or skipped.

2. What An Autonomous Scrubber Does

Autonomous scrubbers and sweepers map the facility once, then run scheduled routes by zone. They use LiDAR and 3D sensing to detect and stop for people, forklifts, pallets, and unexpected obstructions, and they dock to recharge or refill and resume on their own.

Most sites mix two modes. Some zones run during open hours alongside staff and equipment; others run unattended after close when the floor is clear. Scheduling is set per zone and per shift during deployment.

3. Matching The Robot To The Zone

Robot choice follows the floor:

• Large DC floors: machines built for long aisles and open staging, such as the Gausium Beetle, Pudu BG1 Series, and Gausium Scrubber 75P.
• Tight aisles, cut rooms, and branches: compact units such as the CenoBots L3, built for narrow corridors and aisles.
• Dust and debris before a scrub: autonomous sweepers such as the CenoBots S5.
• Outdoor reel yards: an outdoor-rated sweeper such as the Pudu MT1 Max, where a yard exists.

The right mix comes from walking the floor, not from a catalog. Floor type, traffic, and square footage per zone decide it.

4. What It Looks Like When It Works

RobotLAB robots have cleaned more than 256 million square feet across warehouse and DC operations. One regional distribution center deployed a Scrubber 75 across 400,000 sq ft and reached ROI in 11 months on labor savings, with its cleaning crew moved to detail work.

That result is one site with one robot. Your payback depends on your square footage, your current hours, and your wage rate, which is why every walkthrough ends in an ROI model built on your own inputs.

5. Building The Baseline

Before any robot arrives, measure three things for two weeks:

• Hours per week spent on floor care, by zone.
• Square feet cleaned per day, by zone.
• Who does the cleaning, and what they would otherwise be doing.

Those numbers become the before-and-after for the pilot.

6. Start With One Zone

Pick the zone that eats the most hours, deploy one robot, and measure again after 60 days. The hours returned are the number your operations and finance teams will care about. Once one zone proves out, the next zone or the next site follows the same playbook.

7. Who Owns The Deployment

RobotLAB owns the last mile: assessment, robot selection, deployment, mapping, scheduling, staff training, software updates, and ongoing service. Your team does not have to learn robotics to run a robot fleet.

Conclusion

Automation investment in electrical distribution is moving fast at the storage and picking layer. The floor around it is the next place to take hours back. Start with one zone, measure it, and scale.

Run your numbers in the Cleaning Robot ROI Calculator or Book A Free Walkthrough.