On-Site Robot Demo in North America Without a Local Team

Short answer: you can run a solid pre-sales robot demo in North America without a local team if four things are settled in advance: the demo unit lives in North America with a named local custodian; the site questionnaire goes out at T-14 days and the route is verified in person at T-7; the person operating the robot on the day can recover from a fault without phoning anyone, with factory engineers on a schedule that respects the time difference; and an after-demo pack goes out within one business day, stating plainly who fixes the robot locally and how fast. The prospect is not only judging whether the robot works. They are judging what happens in their building when it stops.

This guide is for overseas sales leads and North America expansion managers at robot makers (many of them in China) who have been asked "can you show us on our site?" and don't yet have people in the US or Canada. It is also useful for North American buyers who want to know what a well-run demo looks like. Getting the demo unit into Canada (customs, ATA Carnets, lithium battery shipping) is a separate topic; this guide starts once the robot is in the country. Regulatory and standards information is current as of 2026-10-19, with sources at the end. It is general guidance, not legal, immigration, insurance or certification advice.

The demo countdown at a glance

When	What happens	Who
Ongoing	Demo unit stored indoors, climate-controlled, batteries at storage charge, firmware frozen, accessories in one labeled case, monthly health check	Local custodian
T-14 days	Send the 10-question site questionnaire; start the four long-lead items: charger certification mark, insurance and COI, who may do what on the trip, cellular equipment	Sales + head office
T-7 days	Walk the route (in person or by video): measure doors, check floors, photograph outlets and elevators, test the network or confirm the offline plan	Local field person
T-2 days	Two full rehearsals on demo firmware, one rehearsed fault recovery, record a clean run as backup, confirm who is on call at the factory	Local field person + factory engineer
Day 0	Arrive early and re-walk the route; run the script; show one e-stop and recovery on purpose; apply the fallback plan if needed	Local field person + sales
T+1 day	Send the after-demo pack: site notes, deployment plan, open answers, North American support model, incident note	Sales (site notes from the field person)
T+2 days	Batteries back to storage charge, log run hours, delete the prospect's maps and data, re-pack against the list	Local custodian

Before the countdown: where the demo robot lives

A demo unit spends most of its life waiting. How it waits decides whether it boots on demo day.

Indoors and climate-controlled. Not in a vehicle or an unheated locker. Inland Canada and much of the northern US go well below freezing, and lithium-ion cells generally should not be charged below 0°C. Check your pack's datasheet.
Batteries at storage charge, not 100%. Battery University suggests storing lithium-ion at around 40%; many makers specify 30–60%. Follow your own pack spec, check monthly and log the reading.
Firmware frozen at the version you rehearsed on. No updates in demo week.
One labeled case: charger, dock, spare battery, e-stop key, cables, a printed English quick-start card, and the packing list taped inside the lid.
A named local person with the keys who can receive a courier, power the robot up, run a health check and get it into a van at 7 a.m. If nobody local can do that, the robot effectively still lives in Shenzhen.

Keeping the unit in North America also means one robot can serve several prospects and trade shows without crossing a border each time. The cost is storage space and someone doing regular checks, which a local service partner can handle on a storage-plus-per-visit basis.

T-14 days: the 10-question site questionnaire

Don't send the host a list of everything that could go wrong. Send ten questions they can answer in one email:

Who will attend, by role (operations, facilities, IT, safety, procurement)?
Loading dock hours, and who signs us in?
Freight elevator size and weight limit? Any ramps or raised thresholds on the route?
Narrowest door width on the route?
Floor surface, and will it be mopped or waxed around the demo time?
Glass walls, mirrors or direct sun on the route?
Nearest 120 V outlet to the staging area, and are extension cords allowed?
Can a visitor device join a network, and which one? Or should we plan to run offline?
Do you need a certificate of insurance (COI), and should it name anyone as additional insured?
Any safety orientation, waiver, or photo and video rules?

Question 8 matters more than it looks. Ask IT what they will allow, not what is technically possible. Corporate networks often refuse unknown devices, and guest Wi‑Fi may have a sign-in page or block devices from talking to each other, which breaks robot-to-tablet links. The safest demo runs fully offline.

Also at T-14: four long-lead items overseas teams miss

The charger needs a recognized certification mark, not just a 120 V rating. In B.C., electrical equipment must carry a mark from a certification body accredited by the Standards Council of Canada (cUL, CSA and cETL are common examples) or an approved field-evaluation label such as SPE-1000. US sites often look for a mark from an OSHA-recognized testing laboratory (NRTL). A charger certified only for the China market may be refused by the site's facilities or safety team. More on robot certification in our note on UL 3300 and service robot certification.
The insurance policy, not the certificate. Issuing a COI from an existing policy is usually quick. The slow part is holding a commercial general liability (CGL) policy that a North American site will accept at all; a translated domestic policy often won't be. Start with a broker weeks ahead.
Who may do what on the trip. Attending meetings and running a sales demo is generally treated as business-visitor activity. Hands-on installation or repair is a different question, with its own conditions under the US B-1 business visitor rules and Canada's IRCC business visitor rules. Ask immigration counsel before the engineer books a flight, not at the border.
The cellular router. If you bring one, it needs equipment authorization for that country (ISED in Canada, FCC in the US), must support North American LTE bands, and the carrier may still refuse to activate a device it doesn't recognize. Buying one locally is usually simpler.

T-7 days: verify the site in person

Email answers aren't enough. Someone walks the route with a tape measure, or at minimum the host walks it on video: measure doors, photograph outlets, doors and the elevator, test the network you were offered or confirm the offline plan. For a demo, ride the freight elevator manually; don't promise elevator integration you haven't tested in that building. Our robot deployment checklist has the fuller site-survey list for when the demo turns into a pilot.

Who runs the demo: four options compared

Without a North American team, this is the hardest decision. There are four common arrangements:

Arrangement	Strengths	Weaknesses	Best for
Sales + engineer fly in from head office	Deepest product knowledge; can tune parameters on site	Flights, hotels, visas and roughly two weeks of staff time per trip; business-visitor limits to check; when the prospect asks "who fixes it later?", the answer is still overseas	The one critical demo for a major account
Local dealer or integrator	Existing customer relationships; knows local sites	Requires a channel agreement first; may carry competing brands; technical depth varies	Brands that already have a channel partner
Local field-service partner operates, your sales lead presents (in person or remotely)	Someone on site can handle faults; the "local support" answer is standing in the room; no flight for every demo	Partner needs training and a rehearsal; you own the sales conversation and pricing	Most pre-pilot demos for first customers
Local field-service partner runs a scripted demo alone	Lowest cost; can respond the same week	Standard scripts only; commercial and deep technical questions are answered by you afterwards	Standard products, smaller prospects, trade-show follow-ups

Whichever you choose, one rule holds: someone on site must be able to reset the e-stop, relocalize and restart the robot without making a phone call. A sales lead with a laptop and slides cannot cover the moment the robot stops in front of the customer. If you are weighing these models beyond demos, see how robot makers offer on-site service in North America without hiring a team.

The time-zone rule: run without the factory, or when the factory is awake

Vancouver and most of B.C. stopped changing clocks in March 2026 and now stay on UTC-7 all year. China is UTC+8, so the gap is 15 hours, year-round.

10 a.m. in Vancouver = 1 a.m. in Beijing.
3–5 p.m. in Vancouver = 6–8 a.m. the next morning in Beijing. If you need a factory engineer live, this is the workable window.
US West Coast still changes clocks. From 1 November to mid-March, Seattle and Los Angeles are 16 hours behind Beijing and an hour behind Vancouver. Book cross-border visits in city time, not "Pacific time".
10 a.m. in New York = 10 p.m. in Beijing (11 p.m. after 1 November). East Coast mornings are easier than West Coast ones.

Rule: either the demo runs with no dependency on the factory, or you schedule it while the factory is awake and write down who is on call, on which channel, and how logs reach them.

T-2 days: rehearse, including a failure

Charge fully, run the demo script twice back to back, note the battery left.
If the robot needs a map, book a mapping slot at the site. Never map in front of the audience.
Rehearse the failure: hit the e-stop mid-run, reset, relocalize, restart. Time it.
Record one clean run on video as the last-resort fallback.
Confirm the factory on-call person, their local time, the channel, and how logs get to them.

Day 0: what the room will ask, and the fallback plan

Arrive early and walk the route again; floors get mopped and pallets move. Then expect questions about what the robot does to them:

Who	Typical questions
Operations	What happens when it stops mid-shift? Who resets it and how long does it take? How long is training?
Facilities	Will it mark the floor? Where does it charge? How does it handle doors, elevators and fire alarms?
IT	What data leaves the building and where is it stored? Which ports? Can it run on an isolated network? Can we approve updates first?
Safety	Where is the e-stop? How fast near people? What can't the sensors see? Which standards was it evaluated against? For industrial mobile robots that often means ANSI/A3 R15.08, whose new Part 3 covers user sites.
Procurement / decision-maker	Who supports it locally, in which city, and how fast? Where are the spare parts?

Most of these are versions of "what happens when it goes wrong?", so show one recovery on purpose. Halfway through, press the e-stop. If the host confirms visitors may operate equipment, hand the quick-start card to the most skeptical person in the room and let them reset and restart it. Thirty seconds of controlled failure answers more questions than ten minutes of smooth driving.

Write the fallback plan on a card before you arrive:

Level 1, up to 5 minutes: local recovery by the person on site. E-stop reset, relocalize, reboot. No phone calls.
Level 2, up to 20 minutes: switch to a reduced demo (shorter route, manual drive) and say plainly what happened.
Level 3: stop. Show the recorded run, book a return visit, send a written preliminary cause within one business day, give a date for the full root cause, and meet it.

Two things not to do: don't attempt a firmware fix on the prospect's network, and don't blame their building in front of them. Their building is where the robot has to work.

T+1 day: the after-demo pack

Send it within one business day, while the people in the room still remember the demo:

Site notes with photos: route, doors, floor, network, power. It shows you paid attention to their building, not just your robot.
A one-page deployment plan: phases (site survey, mapping, pilot, acceptance), durations as ranges, and what the customer must provide. Our robot commissioning checklist for Canada covers the acceptance side.
Answers to every open question, labeled by who asked.
The support model, in their time zone: who fixes it locally and from which city, target response times, remote versus on-site, where spare parts sit, support hours.
An incident note if anything went wrong: cause, fix, prevention.

Item 4 is the easiest to leave vague, and the one procurement is most likely to read twice. If your engineers are in China, say so, and name the local partner who will be on site.

At T+2, reset: batteries back to storage charge and run hours logged; send the factory an issue list from the demo, however minor; delete the prospect's site map, photos and any logs containing their data from the robot and tablets unless they agreed otherwise in writing (their IT team asked where the data goes, so make the answer true); re-pack the case against the list in the lid.

Common mistakes

Keeping the demo unit at the factory and shipping it for each demo. Customs, battery shipping rules and the time difference stack up, and the prospect won't wait.
Showing only the happy path. If the prospect never sees who handles a fault, they assume the worst.
Assuming the site Wi‑Fi will work. Client isolation on guest networks is common.
Mapping on demo day. It takes time and exposes tuning in front of the customer.
Updating firmware in demo week. The rehearsed version is the demo version.
Slow follow-up. An after-demo pack sent a week later has lost the room.

What KeepRobots can do

KeepRobots is a robot field-service company based in Vancouver. We don't make or sell robots and we are not an exclusive agent for any brand; we don't negotiate or quote on your behalf, and we don't give legal, immigration or insurance advice. For pre-sales demos, we can fill the "local field-service partner" column in the table above:

On-site demo support: operate the robot alongside your sales lead, or run your standard demo script ourselves.
Demo-unit and spare-parts storage in Vancouver, with regular checks, a pre-demo power-up and transport to the site.
Site verification and rehearsal: the T-7 route walk, the T-2 rehearsal and fault drill, and written site notes.
After the demo: deployment, hourly on-site repair and preventive maintenance, so the "who fixes it locally" line in your after-demo pack has a real answer.
English and Chinese service; our engineers read Chinese technical documentation and can work around your head office's hours.

Current published rates, before tax: diagnostic fee $200 CAD in Canada / $200 USD in the US, per robot, per visit (credited against an approved repair); Greater Vancouver core-area call-out $100 CAD per visit; on-site labour $150 CAD / $150 USD per hour. Travel outside the core area and US projects are quoted per project. A worked example, not a quote: one customer-site demo in the Greater Vancouver core area, with a 3-hour site check and rehearsal the day before and 4 hours on demo day including early arrival, is 7 × $150 = $1,050 CAD plus two call-outs at $200 CAD, about $1,250 CAD before tax and storage.

We focus on B.C. and Greater Vancouver and travel to the rest of Canada and the US (see robot service across Canada). To plan a North American demo, send a couple of lines about your product, the prospect's city and rough timing to partners@keeprobots.com, or read how the North America field-service partnership works.

FAQ

Who should run a robot sales demo in North America if we have no local team?

There are four common options: fly in sales and an engineer from head office; use a local dealer or integrator; have a local field-service partner operate the robot while your sales lead presents in person or remotely; or have the local partner run a standard demo script alone. For most first-customer demos the third option fits best. In every case, someone on site must be able to reset the e-stop, relocalize and restart the robot without calling anyone.

How far ahead should we prepare an on-site robot demo in the US or Canada?

At least two weeks. Send the site questionnaire at T-14 days and start the long-lead items at the same time (charger certification mark, insurance and COI, business-visitor limits, cellular equipment), verify the route at T-7, and rehearse twice including a fault recovery at T-2. If the demo unit is not yet in the country, add several weeks for customs and battery shipping.

What if the robot fails during the demo?

Use a three-level fallback plan written in advance: within 5 minutes, local recovery by the person on site (e-stop reset, relocalize, reboot); within 20 minutes, switch to a reduced demo and explain what happened; otherwise stop, show a pre-recorded run, book a return visit and send a written preliminary cause within one business day. Don't patch firmware on the prospect's network and don't blame their site.

How do we schedule a demo around the time difference with China?

B.C. has been on UTC-7 year-round since March 2026, so Vancouver is 15 hours behind Beijing all year: 10 a.m. in Vancouver is 1 a.m. in Beijing, and 3–5 p.m. is 6–8 a.m. the next day. Either make the demo independent of the factory, or schedule it while the factory is awake with a named on-call engineer. US West Coast cities fall an hour behind Vancouver from 1 November.

What should we send the prospect after the demo?

Within one business day, send site notes with photos, a one-page phased deployment plan, answers to open questions, a support model in the customer's time zone (who fixes it locally, from where, how fast, where spares are kept) and an incident note if anything went wrong. Unless the customer agreed otherwise in writing, delete their site maps, photos and logs from the robot and tablets.

How much does local demo support cost in Vancouver?

At KeepRobots' published rates, before tax: $150 CAD per hour on site and $100 CAD call-out per visit in the Greater Vancouver core area. A demo with a 3-hour site check and rehearsal plus 4 hours on demo day comes to about $1,250 CAD before tax and storage. This is an illustrative estimate, not a quote.

Sources

Technical Safety BC, approved certification marks for electrical products: technicalsafetybc.ca
OSHA Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory program: osha.gov
Battery University BU-410, charging at high and low temperatures: batteryuniversity.com; BU-702, how to store batteries: batteryuniversity.com
USCIS, B-1 temporary business visitor: uscis.gov; IRCC, business visitors to Canada: canada.ca
ISED, radio equipment standards: ised-isde.canada.ca; 47 CFR Part 2 Subpart J, FCC equipment authorization: ecfr.gov
Government of B.C., permanent daylight saving time: gov.bc.ca
Robotics 24/7, A3 announces R15.08 Part 3 safety standard for industrial mobile robot users: robotics247.com

Hours and example costs on this page are illustrative estimates, not measured data. KeepRobots rates are current published rates and may change; taxes, parts and travel outside the core area are extra. Regulatory and standards information is as of 2026-10-19 and is not legal, immigration, insurance or certification advice.

Running a robot sales demo in North America without a local team