[box type=”shadow” ]
We have to find a way of dealing with increasing urbanisation in terms of sustainability and saving resources. Data is our best chance here, but also our biggest challenge.
Philipp Kipf
[/box]
Building Clean
In conversation with Marco Cardinale, Head of Product Management Floor Care at Kärcher, on the demands of building cleaning and the secret of truly autonomous cleaning robots.
What do professional operators need in Municipal Cleaning?
Building service contractors today have two major issues to contend with: cost pressures on the one hand, with labour costs accounting for around 80% of their expenses. And owing to high staff turnover, among other things, there is also the expense of recruitment and induction. Our task is to provide the best possible support to building service contractors in their work and processes so that they can reduce their overall cleaning costs.
When it comes to efficiency, can cleaning robots make a difference?
This is currently only possible and economically viable, on large, unobstructed surfaces. There are cleaning robots for scrub vacuuming on the market, but in our view these are still somewhat underdeveloped and costlier too.
For more complex areas of use like office cleaning, with many obstructed surfaces, cleaning robots cannot currently match the efficiency of a professional cleaner.
There are, however, many areas of application in which the use of a robot is conceivable and efficient with currently available technologies. This market is definitely big enough. Essential for us is 100% functionality and safety, especially if the robots are to be used in public spaces. The challenge is to intelligently link different technologies, which requires high-performance software.
What would your perfect cleaning robot look like, and where would it be used?
My vision is to have a cleaning robot that achieves maximum autonomy and that can be used on all surfaces 100% safely and economically. This would allow us to open up numerous fields of application, even in busy public areas.
Will there be intelligent cleaning robots?
Of course, a great many possibilities can result from combining digitisation, i.e. the smart networking of data, and automation, i.e. robotics. You can use data from weather services, for example, to determine cleaning demand. But I think in our industry we always have to look at what will actually bring our customers added value. This guiding principle also applies to comprehensive intelligence.
[box type=”shadow” ]
My vision is to have a cleaning robot that achieves maximum autonomy with a variety of new technologies and that can be used on all surfaces 100% safely and economically. That would be the breakthrough that must be made in the next five years, and that current solutions have not yet made. This would allow us to open up numerous fields of application, even in busy public areas.”
Marco Cardinale
[/box]
Artificial Intelligence
Dr Alexander Rieck, Fraunhofer IAO (Fraunhofer Institute for Labour Economics and Organisation) talks about automatic goats, human impatience and how far we are from real artificial intelligence.
Thinking about the City of the Future – where does this road lead in your view?
There is no such thing as the one true “City of the Future”. For me the key question is why do people move to cities in the first place? In South America or Asia, this is linked with chances of survival, because outside the megacities there are very few ways of securing a regular income. It comes down to the simple fact that living together with other people opens up opportunities, and the higher the population density, the more opportunities there are from a statistical point of view.
