ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

i-team Global is the company behind the cobot concept - and a full range of these machines are on display on its stand.

"The cobot philosophy is all ours, and we also came up with the name," said global ambassador Frank van de Ven. "It's all about the collaboration between robots and humans.

"An operator will make a visual assessment of a building to see what needs to be done. But a machine cannot see what a human can see, and it won't be able to ‘get' the room in the same way as a human can."

Products on the stand include the Cobotic 1700 vacuum cleaner and the Cobotic 65 autonomous scrubber dryer which is said to be able to automatically navigate complex environments.

One novel aspect of the i-Team stand is that all staff members are kitted out with shoe mops.

Everyone's feet are encased in mops in red, green, blue and yellow - with some people even choosing different colours for each feet.

"It attracts attention while underlining our philosophy of making cleaning more fun," explains van de Ven. "It also highlights our sustainability credentials because when using shoe mops, people can clean the floors without using any extra energy or effort."

The stand staff will also have much less heavily blistered Interclean feet, we're guessing.