Innovative robots make cleaning work easier
At night, cleaners use high-pressure sprayers to clean the machines that produce our much-needed food by day. It’s demanding work and puts particular strain on cleaners’ wrists. Couldn’t technology provide a helping hand? This is the question cleaning company Gom pondered when it went in search of a technical solution that would make life easier for its cleaners. As a result, Gom and Kleentec (a Gom subsidiary) partnered with the TU Delft field lab RoboHouse in April 2023, and their client Hilton Foods Holland offered Gom the opportunity to carry out tests.
Text: Bennie Mols • Photos: Delta/Thijs van Reeuwijk • November 19, 2024
"What we liked most about RoboHouse's approach", says Mieke Sprinkhuizen, industry innovation manager at Gom, "is that the cleaners themselves were involved in the solution from day one. RoboHouse researchers first broke down the cleaning process into small pieces and examined how each part could be improved by technology. Which parts of the job are demanding and which are not? What do cleaners enjoy doing and what would they rather get rid of?”
Exoskeleton
The collaboration has now led to a prototype of an exoskeleton that cleaners can wear on their forearms. This exoskeleton naturally transfers the strain placed on their wrists to the larger arm muscles, which can handle it better than the wrist.
“The cleaners’ feedback was clear; the exoskeleton makes their jobs easier”, says Sprinkhuizen. “We’re now preparing for a second phase in which we will investigate how to make the jet and spray nozzles of the high-pressure cleaner adjustable for even greater ease of use. We will work with the manufacturer, who will be responsible for incorporating our innovation into a commercial product.”
What we liked most about RoboHouse's approach, is that the cleaners themselves were involved from day one.
Vacuum scrubber robot
Since Gom also cleans the TU Delft campus, it came up with the idea to explore other ways in which robotics could aid cleaners. “We recently embarked on a pilot project with a vacuum scrubber robot that cleans the floors of the Industrial Design Faculty”, says Charlotte Morijn, GOM’s Performance Centre Manager. Already commercially available, the robot scrubs the floor and vacuums up the water at the same time, which means that the human cleaner becomes more of an operator and supervisor. They may have to prepare the floor for the robot, for example, or check the results afterwards, paying particular attention to hard-to-reach spots.
So what do the results show? Morijn: "We evaluated how the cleaners perceived their work, how the robot affected their physical workload, the impact on the diversity and quality of work, and the costs. Now that the pilot has run its course, the robot is poised to be implemented in practice but the TU Delft campus is a complex place. No two buildings are the same, so a bespoke solution is in order. For some buildings, we need a smaller robot, and for others, we only need a vacuum robot.”
Understanding the surrounding
The vacuum scrubber has now also been embraced in the faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Pulse but as useful as it has already proved to be, there is still room for improvement. That improvement is exactly what Martijn Wisse, professor of biorobotics at TU Delft, spends his days looking for. During a brainstorming session with Gom and a group of cleaners, he developed an interest in innovative robotic solutions for the cleaning sector.
“One of today’s great scientific challenges is to develop a robot that understands its surroundings”, Wisse begins. “Currently, a cleaning robot sees all obstacles as generic obstacles that they should avoid and don’t understand what certain objects mean in a particular context. Suppose a vase fell on the floor, leaving shards of glass and a puddle of water. A robot would register the resulting mess as an obstacle and therefore avoid it. You’d want a robot to notify the operator if it finds something it can’t clean itself, for example by taking a picture and sending it to the operator.”
Cleaning company Gom
Cleaning company Gom Cleaning company Gom is one of the three largest cleaning companies in the Netherlands. It is part of the Facilicom Group, a family-owned company with a 60-year track record. Gom has some 8,000 staff members, who work together to clean offices, educational institutions (including TU Delft), healthcare facilities, industrial environments and food-processing plants. Because cleaning work is physically demanding and highly repetitive, Gom is constantly looking for technology that supports workers, such as ergonomic tools and robots. Gom works with TU Delft’s RoboHouse field lab and with researchers from the faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design. Gom now has 34 cleaning robots up and running (in various shapes and sizes) and expects to expand this to 54 before the end of the year.
AI systems
In his study, Wisse demonstrates a small, mobile robot that sends camera footage to the ChatGPT AI bot. Wisse: “My research revolves around how AI systems can help robots understand their environment. We have dozens of these robots and give them to our students to use as a platform for experimentation. I’m also researching how we can leverage our knowledge of how the human brain works to improve robotic brains."
One of today's great scientific challenges is to develop a robot that understands its surrondings.
Visibility
Wisse is pleased that robots are finally starting to become more visible on the TU Delft campus. “We’ve been conducting high-level scientific research on robots for years now but the robots themselves always remained invisible to students, staff and visitors. It’s my hope that the visibility of the cleaning robot at our faculty and at Industrial Design inspires students to develop other robots for the campus, such as a robot that can clean outdoor spaces, trim the hedges or ferry around equipment inside. The city of Delft is considering declaring 2026 the year of robotics, which would be an incredible incentive for TU Delft to increase the visibility of robots.”
Marco Rozendaal, associate professor of Interaction Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design, also attended the brainstorming meeting with Gom and the cleaners. “The scrubber robot inspired me to include robotics in the industrial design curriculum", Rozendaal says, “and that’s how I came up with the idea of having second-year undergraduates taking Design Project 3 suggest ways in which robotics could help clean the TU Delft campus."
Long-term innovation
From September 2023, some 300 students spent six months thinking about technically feasible robotic solutions that consider how cleaning is organised, the needs and wishes of the cleaners themselves, and ESG aspects such as energy and material use. Gom was closely involved throughout the programme. "The students came up with countless new robotic concepts to help cleaners", Rozendaal says with pride, “some of which tied in perfectly with ongoing developments at Gom, while others were more long-term prospects.
A striking example of one such a long-term innovation is a robotic telescopic arm of sorts that would help cleaners clean the fold-out tables in the lecture halls. “It’s currently a tricky challenge for cleaners”, Rozendaal explains, “because they have to unfold the tables one by one. With a telescopic arm, they’d be able to clean them without unfolding them first. What makes the idea so powerful is that it’s a wearable piece of equipment that would effectively imbue cleaners with a superpower.”
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