Robotic Floor Cleaner Helps Teach Students Coding in a Plano School from Phil Ohme on Vimeo.

Keeping schools clean and hallways buffed takes lots of time and manpower under normal circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic only made a tough job harder.

Some districts have turned to robots for rescue.

In October 2020, for example, the school board in Rochester, Minnesota, approved $455,000 to purchase seven autonomous floor scrubbers to clean the middle and high school floors and free up maintenance personnel for other, more urgent needs when in-person classes resume. School officials estimate that the investment, which comes from federal COVID-19 grants to schools, will pay for itself in three years while increasing the safety and health of students and staff.

New Jersey’s Southern District public school system adopted a similar approach last fall, adding several Avidbots Neo autonomous hall cleaning and disinfecting robots to prepare two high schools and one middle schools to welcome students back into classrooms. (Video, below)

Avidbots Neo | Helping To Welcome Back Students from Avidbots.

Even before the pandemic, Jim Ryan, the building and grounds director of the Churchville-Chili Central School District, a 4,000-student system near Rochester, N.Y., was looking for ways to boost the speed and efficiency of  cleaning the system’s six buildings – three of which were connected by a half-mile of contiguous corridors. In 2019, the high school tested two self-driving robotic lawn mowers on the grassy courtyards as a way of freeing up time for other, more urgent maintenance work. The next year, inspired by autonomous floor scrubbers he’d seen at several trade shows, the B&G director came up with a similar solution for floors.

Powered by advanced vision-based artificial intelligence, the Tennant T7AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber is designed to work safely alongside employees while they attend to other tasks, navigating around or stopping for a person or obstacle in its path. It requires minimal training, enabling operators to get up to speed quickly. In Churchville-Chili tests, the robotic scrubber cleaned dirty floors as effectively as the two ride-on machines the district used to rely on to perform the nightly buffing. The old machines are still used for certain purposes, but the maintenance crew has been freed up for such priorities as tidying classrooms and cleaning high-touch areas, including countertops, door handles, and bathrooms – important tasks that formerly required the hiring of substitute crews.

Meanwhile, St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic School in Plano, Texas, is using its novel robotic floor cleaner – named LEO – not only to sanitize hallways during the COVID-19 crisis but also to teach kids coding, NBC5 in Dallas-Fort Worth reports. (Video, top.)

Will COVID-19 spark other automated hygiene aides? San Francisco-based RobotLAB is marketing a range of health robots for schools, from units that take students’ temperatures when they enter the building to room sanitizers that spray disinfectant on door handls and desks. In England, robots designed to purify the air in hospitals using ultraviolet light are being deployed in schools to combat the coronavirus.

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Tags: avidbots, building maintenance, Churchill-Chili Central School District public schools, Engineering, robot floor scrubbers, Robotics, Rochester Minnesota Public Schools, school cleaning robotic sweeper, St. Marks School Plano Texas, Sterilight UV air sanitizing robot, Tennant automatic floor scrubber