One of the lasting side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is a conscious effort to keep surfaces as clean as possible. At the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, robotic cleaners could be seen washing floors, wiping counters, and spraying sanitiser alongside their human colleagues.

With robotic vacuum cleaners already commonplace in homes around the globe, it's only a matter of time until cleaning jobs are exclusively staffed by machines. However, their track record isn't always squeaky clean; a robot vacuum sparked a city-wide search in Cambridge, England in 2022 after escaping a hotel due to a sensor failure.