A U.N. report forecasts a surge in robot use by 2007, but many U.S. colleges and hospitals are already using robots for scrubbing floors.
Commercial floor cleaning is an ideal application for robots, says Intellibot chief executive officer Henry Hillman. The work is repetitive, the workspace is usually geometric, and the results are measurable.
Intellibot’s cleaning robot, the Intellibot’s IS 750 floor scrubber, cleans up to 10,000 square feet per hour, runs up to four hours on a single battery, and operates an eight-hour shift with about 30 minutes of human intervention.
Similar to the Mars rovers, the IS 750 uses software running on on-board computers to map the areas to be cleaned and create a program with the optimum cleaning pattern.
Sonar sensors detect moving and stationary objects in the scrubber’s path, navigate around obstacles, and avoid pitfalls like stairways, but if the unit encounters a problem it can’t solve, it pages the human operator.
Hillman forecasts that in 10 years, most commercial floors will be cleaned with robots. Floor cleaning is an application where robots can do a better job at lower cost, he said.
