How many robots does a venue need?

It depends on trip length and trip frequency, not on floor area. A large venue with a short pass-to-table run may need fewer units than a small venue with a long one. Measure trips per shift and time per trip before anyone quotes you a number.

Why will nobody quote a price on a website?

Because the robot is one line of several. Site survey, mapping, integration with existing systems, staff training and ongoing support vary by venue, and a headline price that excludes them is a number designed to start a conversation rather than to inform a decision.

How do I calculate return without vendor figures?

Take your own baseline first — trips per shift, minutes per trip, how often somebody is interrupted to do it. After deployment, compare against the fleet's recorded completed tasks and distance travelled. The comparison is then measured on your floor rather than modelled on someone else's.

What changes in a multi-floor building?

Lifts. Whether a robot can call and use a lift depends on the hardware and on whether the building's lift can be integrated, and that single question usually decides whether a deployment is one fleet serving every floor or a separate unit per floor.

Cluster guide

Smart robotic solutions: choosing and buying

Buying a service robot is an operations decision with a hardware invoice attached. The questions that decide whether it works are how many units the space needs, what the total cost includes beyond the robot itself, how you will measure the result against a baseline you took first, and how the building is laid out.

Written by Hybot operations lead, Deployment and operations lead, Hyrcan-Tech · 2 February 2026 · 7 min read

The decision, not the product

Most buying guides in this field are product tours. This cluster is not. It is about the four questions that actually determine the outcome, all of which you can answer before speaking to any supplier — and answering them first is what stops a demo from doing your thinking for you.

What is in this cluster

A method for calculating service robot ROI — the baseline you must take before deployment, and what to compare against afterwards.
What drives the cost of a service robot? — every line beyond the hardware, and which ones are venue-specific.
How many robots does a restaurant need? — sizing from trip length and frequency rather than floor area.
Service robots in multi-floor buildings — lifts, per-floor maps, and the survey question that decides the shape of the deployment.

Take the baseline first

This is the single recommendation worth more than everything else on this page, and it costs a fortnight of noticing rather than any money.

Count the trips. Time one. Note how often the person doing it was pulled off something else. Without that, any post-deployment number is unanchored, and the conversation with your finance team becomes an argument about feelings.

Afterwards you have something to compare against: Hybot records completed tasks and distance travelled per robot, daily and lifetime, visible in fleet management.

What we will not publish

Prices, packages, payback periods or customer results. Pricing depends on unit count, venue layout and integration work; payback depends on your baseline; and no customer has agreed to be named. Any of those numbers, published generically, would be a number we invented.

Tell us about the venue and we will quote against it.

Frequently asked questions

How many robots does a venue need?: It depends on trip length and trip frequency, not on floor area. A large venue with a short pass-to-table run may need fewer units than a small venue with a long one. Measure trips per shift and time per trip before anyone quotes you a number.
Why will nobody quote a price on a website?: Because the robot is one line of several. Site survey, mapping, integration with existing systems, staff training and ongoing support vary by venue, and a headline price that excludes them is a number designed to start a conversation rather than to inform a decision.
How do I calculate return without vendor figures?: Take your own baseline first — trips per shift, minutes per trip, how often somebody is interrupted to do it. After deployment, compare against the fleet's recorded completed tasks and distance travelled. The comparison is then measured on your floor rather than modelled on someone else's.
What changes in a multi-floor building?: Lifts. Whether a robot can call and use a lift depends on the hardware and on whether the building's lift can be integrated, and that single question usually decides whether a deployment is one fleet serving every floor or a separate unit per floor.

Everything in this cluster

Each of these goes deeper on one part of the topic above.

How many robots does a restaurant need?
Fleet size follows trip length and trip frequency, not floor area. A method for sizing a deployment before anybody quotes you a number of units.
A method for calculating service robot ROI
Take the baseline before you buy. A practical method for measuring what a service robot actually changes, using your own numbers instead of a vendor's model.
Service robots in multi-floor buildings
Lifts decide the shape of a multi-floor deployment. Per-floor maps, the survey question that matters most, and when a robot per floor is the better answer.
What drives the cost of a service robot?
The robot is one line of several. Site survey, mapping, integration, training and support all vary by venue — what to ask before comparing quotes.

Take it further

If a question here applies to a venue you actually run, the specifics matter more than the general case.

Request a quote