Vacuuming is one of the few markets where robots have proven that they can be consistently commercially successful. There's a good reason for this: vacuuming is a repetitive, time-intensive task that has to be performed over and over again in environments that are relatively constrained. Despite the success of several companies in the home robot vacuum space, we haven't seen many low cost platforms designed for commercial areas, but a startup called Avidbots is tackling this idea, and they've got operational prototypes. The problem that these robots are really going to have to solve is the same problem that the Roomba struggles with: cleaning robots are not a substitute for a cleaning human. A Roomba (to use a recognizable example) is a maintenance tool, designed to keep your floors cleaner, longer. But, no matter how often you use your Roomba, you'll still need to occasionally bust out the upright vacuum yourself. It'll be far lass often than you would without a Roomba, but it'll still need to happen, because humans can visually identify dirt and manually maneuver cleaning equipment into places that robots can't reach.

In the case of the Avidbots, you can see in the demo that despite their care with edging, they still miss some areas in corners, close to walls, near complex obstacles, underneath objects that should be temporarily moved, and so forth. Over time, those areas are going to get super dirty, and you'll need to bring in a human to clean them. You'll also have to have humans around to maintain the robots, cleaning them out, replacing fluids, and charging them if they don't auto dock. You'll certainly spend way less human time and labor on cleaning (which is the point, of course), but we're not yet at the point where we can just leave robots completely on their own to perform tasks in human environments. Existing platforms in this commercial cleaning space are generally huge robotic cleaning behemoths, and I like Avidbot's approach of making what looks to be (at least in their concept image) a robot that's more like an existing cleaning platform designed for humans, except with added autonomy.

This gives the robot much more flexibility, increasing the value for the user, who might need to spend an extra five minutes taking manual control to spot clean where the robot missed. Whether or not Avidbots is successful is going to depend heavily on how much money a business can save by transitioning from a human cleaning crew to a robot cleaning crew. rainbow vacuum cleaner technologyAvidbots has some optimistic numbers on this: they're planning on selling their sweeper robot for $7,500 and the scrubber robot for $13,500, or you can rent them for $4 and $6 per hour respectively, inclusive of warranty and service.shark vacuum cleaner australia where to buy If you straight up match these costs with the costs of a human cleaning crew you come out way ahead (saving, as Avidbots calculates, anywhere from about 50 to 70 percent over the course of a year), but this may not take into account some of the other issues that we talked about, including the need for humans to still come in and clean once in a whilemiele vacuum cleaners bags

, robot maintenance, and so forth. Overall, we like this startup idea. It's an area that seems like it can be automated and commercialized, and Avidbots is off to a good start with prototype robots that actually work. We'll follow up on them once some real businesses start testing the robots and can tell us how effective (in terms of cost and cleanliness) they are.Call us at 855.647.6268 We will help you choose the right Roomba for your business. Already know which Roomba model you want for your business?Introducing Neo,Self-Driving Floor Scrubber The Future of Commercial Cleaning Supercharge the productivity of your cleaning crew by allowing them to focus on higher value cleaning tasks and leaving repetitive and tedious floor scrubbing to our robots. Don’t worry about dirty floors or spots missed – The Avidbots ARS-2 knows about every centimeter of the facility and cleans consistently every time. Adjusts to your facility Our robots adapt to any facility no matter their size or layout.

Simply prepare the machine, and press “Start”. With our easy-to-use web interface, you can access detailed cleaning reports down to the square foot and monitor one robot up to an entire fleet of robots across all your locations. Want to see Neo in action?A Vision Of The Future Flashback to the 1980s: Electrolux was known in the appliance market for their forward-thinking technological innovation and they charged their subsidiary, The Kent Company, to create a prototype for an automated floor-cleaning machine. Eventually the team brought on Joe Engelberger of the Transitions Research Corporation (TRC). Already well known for his work in the robotics world, Engleberger and his team had a profound influence on what would eventually become TASKI Intellibot. Despite growing interest in these automated floor cleaners, Electrolux sold The Kent Company in 1999, and the new parent corporation chose not to pursue the product line. Not to be deterred, two of the project’s primary engineers quickly founded their own company to pursue the robots’ continued development.

That company became Intellibot Robotics, LLC in 2003. All Robots, All The Time The Intellibot team, no longer just an innovative branch of another company, were laser-focused on making awesome floor-cleaning robots, which led to big changes. New generations of robots led to advancements in mapping abilities, followed quickly by a surge of new features—like the robots’ first GUI, and what would later become the advanced navigation present today. Then, in 2009, a new generation of robots rolled onto the scene—the most radically redesigned versions to date. New techniques for sensor-data acquisition coupled with multi-sensor-modality navigation meant an operator could clean multiple areas without being taught, and the innovative fleet management tool called Intelli-Trak brought updates to the customer via web, email and text. Today, Intellibot robots are the perfect combination of quality, efficiency, value, and productivity. They offer the latest in technological features such as a UV light for removing 99.9% of viruses and bacteria, and they also have a minimal environmental impact compared to traditional floor cleaning methods.