Fuji Heavy Industries (very heavy) and Sumitomo have introduced the future of industrial cleaning automatons—a beefed-up Roomba-like bot that not only cleans a Japanese office tower’s filthy floors, but takes the elevator to cover the whole building all by itself.
The ‘bot interfaces with an office tower’s elevators via an optical control system (which it uses laser orientation to find), effectively eliminating the need for multiple bots on different floors, all in the name of “achieving homogenization and the environment clean and tidy with a good feeling to move,” according to Google Translate.
Whether the Heavy Services Robots Local 121 will have anything to say about all of the robots that just became redundancies, we shall see. [PDF press release (Japanese) via Crunch Gear]
