SoftBank Robotics has announced that, as of the end of June 2020, it recorded global cumulative sales of more than 10,000 units of its AI-enabled vacuum-cleaning robot, Whiz.
As a result, Whiz has captured a 55% market share of the autonomous professional cleaning robot market, making it the global number-one by sales, according to Grand View Research.
Following the launch of its humanoid robot Pepper, SoftBank announced Whiz as its second robot in November 2018, and began providing it commercially from May 2019 in Japan. Whiz was later launched in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and the USA, and is now available in five countries and regions. To date, Whiz has cleaned floor spaces equivalent to over 335,000km.
Furthermore, in response to the spread of Covid-19, in June 2020, SoftBank reportedly verified that the virus can be reduced by using Whiz to clean floors, and it also began offering ‘Disinfection Solution (β version)’, an agent combined with Whiz, to disinfect walls, door handles and other points inside buildings, in Japan.
Against the backdrop of heightened worldwide interest in cleanliness at facilities and demands to shift cleaning tasks from manual labor to robots, SoftBank said it now plans to expand Whiz sales to other countries and regions in the future.
