Autonomous Robots in School Environments After COVID-19

After COVID-19, schools will never be the same again. From kindergartens to universities, education institutes have experienced sudden and unprecedented disruption to how daily operations are carried out.

Singapore saw a complete closure of schools from April 2020 to June 2020, with schools only starting to reopen on a limited scale since July 2020. In certain institutions, teachers were the only ones returning to schools, some other schools see a full reopening, but most academic institutions are running on a hybrid model, where students and teachers return to school on a rotational schedule.

Regardless of each school’s policy on how students and teachers are returning, it is of key priority that schools are clean and safe.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) has clearly outlined a series of housekeeping guidelines that schools need to abide by when reopening. Schools need to ensure that the environment is clean, safe and conducive for students by increasing their frequency of cleaning.

New Challenges That Schools Face

Campus management officers face increased difficulties for the following tasks:

• Sanitise: Schools need to do deep cleaning of offices and other rooms on campus more frequently, which is more time-consuming and labour intensive.

• Scheduling: Management needs to plan the duty roster to clean the entire school more effectively. They also need to manage more workload between the same or less staff.

• Safety: Cleaners who are frontline workers are naturally more at risk for exposure to the deadly virus. If more physical cleaning is required it also means higher risk for these workers.

Our Solution

The Snail sweeper robot is a fully autonomous cleaning robot built specifically for urban environments that can automatically charge, dispense and refill water all by themselves.

Efficiency: Powered by state-of-the-art hardware and patented class-leading navigation system, the Snail is engineered to know precisely where it has cleaned and where else to clean. It is designed to operate continuously on a single battery charge and a single tank of water thanks to the innovative four-stage filtering system that also saves water!

Simplicity: The Snail's design is constantly improving with suggestions from operators of cleaning service providers, to cater to cleaning operators from diverse educational backgrounds of all levels and age groups.

Safety: The Snail uses many sensors such as Lidar system, 3D depth camera and ultrasonic sensors to perfectly navigate itself to avoid any person or obstacles. With the Snail being dispatched round the clock, management offices do not have to worry about lack of manpower or exposure to social interactions.

Remote Management: Management offices can check in on the Snail at any time and get real-time updates on the progress using the Fleet Management System or through a user-friendly Mobile App. The software allows you to monitor the performance and access cleaning reports remotely.

Minimal Human Intervention & Maintenance: The Snail cleans on schedule and does not involve human intervention in its cleaning operations. It only requires as low as 2 hours every month for general maintenance and upkeep to push productivity to new levels.

Schools around the world are already using the Snail to address the increased need for regular and consistent cleaning. By leaving the constant cleanliness of the floors to the Snail, school management offices can focus on dispatching their cleaners to other tasks such as disinfection of tables and apparatus.