Fukuoka, Doha, Paris: the pools the world watches

A competition pool is not a municipal pool with cameras around it. The cleaning window is counted in minutes, between heats. The water has to look flawless on screen. And nothing — nothing at all — may be left on the bottom when the swimmers come back.

In July 2023 the CHRONO MP3XL cleaned the pools of the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, from 23 to 30 July. The same robots then travelled to Qatar for the Doha Worlds in February 2024, and on to the Paris Olympic Games in the summer of 2024. Hexagone had already been chosen for the Rio and London Games.

None of this is a demonstration. It is a service constraint: 50 m³/h of suction, enough to pick up a plaster or a hair, and four levels of filtration — 20, 105, 250 or 1,000 microns — depending on what you need to hold back. The rest is ergonomics, because a robot lifted out of the water twenty times a day has to come out without strain: front handle, touchscreen interface, inflatable wheels to cross the footbaths.

These events do not change the machine. They verify it. A robot that survives eight days of a world championship will survive a season in a municipal pool — and it is the same machine, from the same catalogue, that works every night in the public pools of Paris.