A clean facade is critical to the continued vitality of any building. Skyscrapers can’t inspire the awe that they were designed to evoke with dirty windows. This is why the window cleaning market has grown to a value of over $40 billion globally and continues to grow today. The problem, as the Skyline Robotics team points out, is that it’s an often dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming job.
Michael Brown is the chairman and CEO of Skyline Robotics. He believes that automation will become an important part of facade work and work at heights in the near future. As he explains, “Automation is not only safer, but it’s also faster, more effective, and more cost-efficient in the long term.”
Introducing Ozmo
Skyline Robotics recently introduced the world’s first window-cleaning robot, Ozmo. With its cutting-edge combination of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technology, Ozmo was designed for efficiency. Best of all, it saves lives without losing jobs, keeping humans in the driver’s seat.
Ozmo provides several benefits compared to human window washers. Ozmo is 3 times faster than traditional window cleaning. Ozmo is safer; humans simply supervise from above, out of harm’s way, as robots do the cleaning. Ozmo saves businesses money by reducing onsite labor costs up to 67%. This not only cuts the largest operational cost significantly, but also offers a company the opportunity to perform more cleanings with its staff. Finally, Ozmo is cleaner. Skyline’s technology ensures Ozmo provides consistent, high-quality cleaning, never missing a spot.
Keeping Workers Safe and Windows Clean
Ozmo represents the arrival of a long-overdue new era of safer window cleaning. Window cleaning has not changed since the industry began. In the last 100 years, buildings have grown significantly in both height and surface area. Cleaning these windows while suspended hundreds of feet in the air poses a great risk for the workers and the public. There are significant amounts of injuries and even severe injuries that occur at heights on a facade each year. Meanwhile, 74% of window cleaners in the USA are over the age of 40, but only 10% are between the ages of 20 and 30. The Ozmo window-cleaning robot is a cutting edge-solution designed to address this impending labor shortage and take humans out of high-risk situations by placing them in control of Skyline’s robotic, Ozmo. According to Michael Brown, “Success means reducing the number of injuries, deaths or otherwise that happen at height to zero.”
Working with Robots
The team is aware of common concerns that robots will take jobs away from humans. Skyline Robotics wants to help lead the charge towards a collaborative working relationship between humans and robots. Ozmo, while autonomous, is still operated by humans. However, they use a computer from the safety of the rooftop, rather than hanging high above the ground. We envision a massive training effort in partnership with the current window cleaning workforce, to get them trained as Certified Ozmo Operators.
The Sky is the Limit for Skyline Robotics
Skyline Robotics’ immediate future will focus on the deployment of the Ozmo robot to buildings around the world. In the near future, they will be exploring potential product extensions related to façade inspections, masonry, painting, and more. “We want to own the façade,” Brown explains. Further out, the team is looking at expanding into other industries, such as maritime, agriculture, and construction, leveraging its software which is specifically developed for outdoor, multivariable environments.
This is Skyline’s vision of success: steady growth and expansion into one of the biggest names in automation tech. According to Brown, “Success is defined by little wins that turn into bigger and bigger wins over time. Being great at something, just like growing a company to operating at scale, doesn’t happen overnight. It happens because you’ve done the little things right, consecutively, and those little wins, become big wins.” With this strategy, Skyline Robotics is sure to accomplish its goals and take the business to new heights.
