“Please move, I am working here,” is one saying students may have heard from an autonomous floor-cleaning device that made its way around the school the week of April 12.
“I was so surprised,” said junior Jordyn Fliegler. “[It] just looked so weird. I’ve just never seen anything like that before. It feels kind of weird for a robot to be roaming around the school, and I was like, ‘What the heck?’”
According to Lauren Bonner, associate principal of operations and studentexperiences, the school has been considering purchasing autonomousfloor-cleaning devices,including a floor scrubber for hard surfaces and a sweeper for carpeted areas.
“They have been on the minds of our buildings and grounds managers for a couple of years, and actually, Glenbrook South took a look at them about three years ago, but the technology just wasn’t advanced enough for our needs,” Bonner said.
Once the robot is programmed, it runs on its own, carrying and refilling its own soap and emptying itself, Bonner said.
According to custodian James Bellman, “The [autonomous floor-cleaning device] will go back to our water closet. It will go on the charging station, dump the dirty water, refill itself and then go back wherever it stopped and restart from that location.”
Without the autonomous cleaning devices, the school floors get cleaned manually every night, and all current machines need to be operated by humans.
“[The autonomous floor-cleaning devices] can be programmed to run at any time we want,” said Bonner. “In other words, we can clean gym floors at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning after everybody’s gone, so it opens up a whole other world of cleaning.”
The week of the test trial, one of the autonomous
floor-cleaning devices entered the gym during a JV volleyball game.
“Someone closed a door, and the robot was smart enough to know [it] needed to go back home to recharge and fill up, so [it] decided to cut through the gym during the volleyball game,” Bellman said.
According to Fliegler, she has walked past the robots and finds itinteresting how it detects people around it.
“I think it’s interesting how this type of technology is becoming more common in everyday life, such as educational spaces like school, but I worry that it might turn into full reliance on technology,” Fliegler said.