ROBOT OF THE WEEK: ROBOMOP
by Hazed
In a case of real life imitating Fed, commercial buildings in Singapore may soon have robot cleaners roaming the floors, in a bid to ease the labour shortage in the city.
Scrub 50 is a fully autonomous cleaning robot, standing just over a metre tall. The director of Gaussian Robotics, one of the firms involved in developing the cleaning droid, said: "It has sensors to detect which part of the building it's at, it sends reports after it finishes cleaning a particular area and there's no danger of it bumping into people or objects because it's equipped with laser detectors, cameras and sensors. In the future we may get it to talk and say 'Excuse me'."
The Scrub 50 is also expected to work faster and more thoroughly than human cleaners. The developers say that daily cleaning of 5,000 sq m over a one-month period would require 300 hours of work from a human, but the robot can do the job in 130 hours. It can also squeeze into small spaces for more thorough cleaning.
But don’t worry about robots taking away jobs from people. The demographics of Singapore mean that the current batch of aging cleaners will soon retire – and young people don’t want to be cleaners these days, so the robots will fill a gap in the labour market.
Scrub 50 is being tested in the building of one of the companies involved, and if it checks out it will be deployed in other buildings later this year.
Sounds great. Now when can I have one for my home?
Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/meet-scrub-50-the-robot-cleaner
