Hong Kong embodied AI summit: C4 and C5 on site

On 12 May, the first Hong Kong Embodied AI Industry Summit brought robots, researchers and operators into one hall. The C4 and the C5 were there alongside humanoid robots, answering a practical question: once a cleaning robot is inside a building or a warehouse, how does the work actually get finished?

Two machines, two kinds of floor

The C5 is built for continuous, large floors — warehouses, industrial parks, the long open routes between them. It sweeps, washes and pushes in one pass, and it does not need someone walking behind it. When power or water runs low, it returns to its station and picks up where it left off. At the booth, the questions were about coverage and turnaround: how much floor in a day, how long a refill takes. Those are not brochure numbers; they only become real on a site.

The C4 is built for buildings and offices, where walls, desks and lifts break the floor into pieces. This generation passes through 600 mm aisles and turns in place within 800 mm, so it can enter the gaps between workstations and at the end of a corridor. Its battery is a quick-swap pack, so a change does not cost a full shift, and edge cleaning means corners no longer need a second pass by hand.

Beyond the spec sheet

A demo at a summit is short. A deployment is long. Before a machine enters a site, someone has to answer how narrow the tightest aisle is, what the floor is made of, when the spills actually happen, and where the station can live. The split between the C5 and the C4 is less about big machine and small machine than about geometry: continuous space versus divided space.

After the summit

The machines have gone back to their sites. We are taking the questions from the floor back to the product and delivery teams — some already have answers, and some belong to the next version. If you are assessing cleaning for your own site, talk to us now rather than waiting for the next exhibition.