Denver schools bring in robots to clean floors

Brain Corp, a developer of software for robots, says that Denver Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts, has selected BrainOS-powered robotics scrubbers, manufactured by Tennant Company, to enhance cleanliness and sanitation at some of its more than 200 schools.

Denver Public Schools made the decision to invest in a large fleet of self-driving floor cleaners to give its facility management employees increased bandwidth to work on other higher-value tasks, such as cleaning between classes and other in-depth cleaning. The machines will be deployed this summer at various high schools in the 90,000-student district.

Rich Archuletta, director of facility operations at Denver Public Schools, says: “These new autonomous floor cleaners are a critical technology investment that will help us enhance cleanliness at 14 of our largest buildings, mainly our 10 comprehensive high schools. This is a huge benefit to our students, while maintaining future operating costs.

“At the same time, this program will help us close a staffing gap most all urban school districts face which is limited funding to meet constantly expanding facility needs.”

Denver Public Schools selected the T380AMR after evaluating several autonomous solutions, and ultimately made its decision based on the quality and serviceability of the Tennant cleaning equipment, as well as the safety, privacy and data features of the cloud-connected BrainOS autonomy software.

District officials were also impressed with the ease of use of the machines, which leverage a proprietary “teach and repeat” methodology that makes it easy for non-technical employees to deploy and adjust cleaning routes on the fly.

Alan Butcher, VP of global client services at Brain Corp, says: “In the wake of the pandemic, nothing is more important than maintaining enhanced cleaning standards to keep students and staff healthy and safe.

“BrainOS-powered scrubbers enable facility leaders to quickly deploy powerful cleaning solutions that have the added benefit of providing detailed ‘proof or work’ metrics, which can be used to verify and optimize performance.”

Ken Boris, commercial market manager at Tennant, says: “A clean learning environment helps students and staff to succeed and grow. We are excited to see more and more school districts like Denver Public Schools adopt robotic scrubbers to create cleaner and safer environments, while also reducing operating costs, and expanding the bandwidth of their valuable employees.”

Working with OEM partners like Tennant, Brain Corp’s SaaS technology platform, BrainOS, currently powers nearly 16,000 autonomous mobile robots worldwide in schools, retail stores, malls and other high-traffic locations. Last year, the company generated 3.3 million hours of additional productivity for end customers.