Robotic Disinfection
Autonomous self-driving indoor robots engineered from scratch and manufactured in Vaasa, Finland
In my last post, I explained a bit about what my startup Done Robotics Ab Oy has been doing. Let me tell you a bit more about our first product and about our grand vision.
Traditionally, robots have been used to automate dull, dirty, or dangerous tasks. Such tasks exist not only in the traditional manufacturing industry where robots are used the most, but in all kinds of companies, organizations, and environments. There are two main aspects that make robotics a great idea:
- Robots possess superhuman capabilities. They can do things we can’t, with higher precision, speed, strength, and stamina, in environments that are hazardous to humans.
- Robots free up time for their human colleagues to focus on the things that matter: expert work and creative work.
At Done Robotics, we build robots to collaborate closely with people, making work more pleasant and efficient, leaving you time for your actual job. We are about to launch a new disinfection robot as a service. The robot can disinfect indoor environments, e.g. hospital isolation rooms, hotel rooms, or public spaces. It does this autonomously, faster than manual disinfection, and with better coverage. No human needs to be exposed to chemicals. A person using the robot simply schedules the robot to go to a specific room and disinfect all surfaces to a specific level. The process also produces a log of the disinfection routine and its performance. Using our RaaS (Robotics as a Service), isolation rooms can be disinfected 16 times faster than by traditional methods, significantly increasing the room utilization time and thereby the queuing time of contagious patients. Rooms can also be disinfected between patients even if the contagion is less hazardous than what would normally warrant such an operation. In short, we make hospitals and clinics safer by reducing healthcare-associated (nosocomial) infections.
Done Robotics is very multicultural and consists of 15 employees and 21 freelancers/consultants working in four teams. We have the know-how to build mechanics, electronics, embedded systems, robot software, apps, and anything in between. This allows us to innovate at all levels and build products that are designed from scratch for the specific needs and goals of our customers. Right now, we are starting our sales process and preparing to launch our first disinfection robot services with customers. Our goal is to produce a service that is extremely fast and easy to start using, and we will handle any maintenance and upgrades with minimum intervention from our busy customers.
To achieve our vision of Robots for people, in the long run, we plan on building a portfolio of robots performing various services. By making our system modular and automatically reconfigurable both in hardware and software, the sky is the limit to what we can build. We can quickly prototype and test new services as we discover what additional problems we can solve for our customers. We are preparing well for this and have spent three years building out the underlying technology. If you can think of a good use for our robots, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I see a bright future coming for the intersection between people and robots. Stay tuned.
