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Autonomous floor-cleaning robots (AFCRs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to provide efficient and effective cleaning without the need for human intervention. These robots can perform various cleaning tasks, such as vacuum cleaning, mopping, scrubbing or sweeping, in domestic or industrial setups. As the use of floor-cleaning robots continues to grow, this paper aims to document key technological advancements.

The structure of the present work relies on published research articles excavated from general online research databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus. The authors use a variety of keywords and titles to search for research papers. Finally, 93 research articles are selected for review based on abstracts and key results that match AFCRs.

According to market trends, floor-cleaning robots dominate other cleaning areas. This review mainly focuses on five attributes of floor-cleaning robots: design and development of AFCR, complete coverage path planning, the application of machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL), optimisation strategies for qualitative output and ethnographic studies. It also consists of discussions based on the results of reported technical works. Hence, AFCRs have dominated the market in the past decade and are likely to be more aggressive in the coming years.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, only a survey article based on US-granted patents published in 2013 constitutes a review work in the research domain on AFCRs. In 2021, another review conducted a survey on the latest technological advancements in window-cleaning robots. It reviewed in detail the locomotion aspects, control mechanisms, adhesion mechanisms, sensors and actuators required for window-cleaning robots. In 2019, a comprehensive review was published on cleaning robots from a control strategy perspective for domestic applications. Therefore, the authors have crafted this review to understand the evolution of floor-cleaning robots in the past decade.