ICMMA establish UK Industry Partnership links with robotics research project

ICMMA representatives met with Prof. Tom Duckett and Dr. Nicola Bellotto last month to explore the University of Lincoln’s FLOBOT project and establish ICMMA’s role as an industry partner to their research into a large-scale, autonomous floor washing machine, for washing the floors of supermarkets, airports and other big areas that have to be cleaned regularly.

Although it can be manually started, programmed and monitored by people, there will be no need to physically move it around making the process more efficient.

Professor Duckett said: “The general idea is to create professional service robots that will work in our everyday environments, providing assistance and helping to carry out tasks that are currently very time – and labour – intensive for human workers. Participating in this Innovation Action project is really exciting, because it means that many of the underpinning research concepts and technologies we have been developing at the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems now have the potential to leave the laboratory and become part of real products like cleaning robots, which could impact on the everyday lives of people everywhere.”