Have you ever seen scrubbing machines within your trusted supermarket, driven by a human operator, or being used to clean indoor spaces inside industrial buildings and airports?
Well, that picture might rapidly become pretty old and unfashionable.
Like many other industries, scrubbing machines are about to be totally revolutionalized by the advent of Mobile Robotics. As house sweepers have already been very familiar for years (iRobot brought its first Roomba vacuum cleaner in 2002, and Scooba floor washing robot in 2005), it’s still hard to find automatic scrubbers for professional applications in use today.
For an international leader in cleaning machines, we recently robotized a novel scrubbing machine, that fully exploits the potential and the expertise of a human operator and the efficiency of a robot.
How can the robot move without a human operator?
Through easy-to-use features, the automated scrubbing machine is capable of learning all the washing operations and the areas to clean. The robot is ready to autonomously clean the designated surface in the most efficient way, by optimizing the path and the quantity of water to clean the area.
And through Natural Guidance, the robot avoids the need for costly infrastructures for navigation. The sensor suite, along with custom software, provides the guarantee of collision-free guidance with unprecedented safety.
How can the robot figure out its location?
Similar to other industrial robots, measurements from laser scanners, cameras and odometry are continuously combined together to create a precise map of the surrounding at runtime. During the movement, sophisticated sensors acquire features from the environment, and provide the information to a computer on board. They are all fused together, and the advanced navigation software implementing Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques reconstructs the environment at runtime.
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