Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
Your industry news - first
The original and best - for over 20 years!
We strongly recommend viewing Cleanzine full size in your web browser. Click our masthead above to visit our website version.
It's not a helicopter... it's a CleanCopter cleaning drone!
No more abseiling down high buildings at risk to life and limb, or working at the limits of the telescopic cleaner, thanks to the cleaning drone from CleanCopter. It has been developed by Stephan Kallweit, a professor of robotics from Aachen, together with the building cleaning contractor Uwe Böhme.
A small version is being flown for the benefit of trade visitors at CMS 17. Currently, this one (and a larger version, which should be ready for production in two years) are contained within a cage, because they have not yet been granted official approval. As Stephan explains: "They fly autonomously, up to the 50th floor and beyond if need be."
For safety reasons, at the exhibition, the cage also contains an operator with a remote control...
"Because they work with deionised water, only a very slight brush pressure is needed on the glass facade," explains Stephan.
While ascending the building, the drones can clean between 10 and 15sq.m. It is intended that the final version will carry up to three litres of water. The creators of this drone envisage that it will be used by cleaning companies that are required to clean large glass frontages on high rise buildings, or inaccessible external facades such as that of the dome of the Berlin Reichstag.
"On completion, between 3.5 and five million euros will have been spent on development," says Uwe Böhme. They are at the trade fair to find joint venture partners among manufacturers and among users too.
21st September 2017