Meet the robots built to clean train carriages
Nathan Western, a researcher working alongside Principal Investigator Mustafa Suphi Erden at the National Robotarium in Edinburgh, explains why working as a cleaner while he was a student inspired him to create robots to help clean the inside of train carriages.
Academic study can sometimes feel a bit abstract – theories and experiments, postulates and conjectures, all laid out in textbooks and research
papers. In contrast, my current project is very, very personal.
Before I moved to Edinburgh to gain my Master’s degree and Doctorate in Robotics, I trained as a mechanical engineer at London South Bank University. To help put myself through university, I worked as a cleaner in a care home in my spare time.
Doing that part-time job gave me first-hand knowledge and experience of the physical toll that cleaning can have on an individual’s body. Bending and stretching, lifting and dragging – it all adds up, whether it’s through short-term problems at the time, or longer-term issues that accumulate and only show themselves years later.
That experience inspired me to create robots that can help cleaners working in train carriages. These aren’t some nightmarish robots from a science fiction film or novel that are out to take away cleaners’ jobs – instead, these robots will work alongside existing members of staff to clean those hard-to-reach places, like the gaps between seats or the space underneath tables.
These past two years during the coronavirus pandemic have underlined the importance of cleanliness and cleaning, but they’ve also added to the burden that cleaning staff
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must deal with on a day-to-day basis. Face coverings, testing kits, and empty hand sanitiser bottles have joined all the other types of hazardous waste that cleaners have to pick up from inside train carriages, from used tissues through to dirty nappies.
Having robots working alongside cleaners will help to remove some of the dirtiest jobs, freeing up members of staff to concentrate on improving the level of hygiene throughout the rest of the carriage, including disinfecting tables and seat- back trays, as well as cleaning the seats themselves.
The robots should also remove a lot of the bending jobs, which should help to reduce injuries at work – the British Cleaning Council recently shared figures from the Health & Safety Executive, which showed there were 1476 injuries involving waste disposal staff last year, and a further 1131 injuries among people servicing buildings.
Getting industry input
The first step in developing our robots was to speak to the people on the frontline – the cleaners. As well as funding our project, the Rail Safety & Standards Board (RSSB) – which consists of Network Rail, the train operators, and other companies working on the railways – has connected us to stakeholders throughout the industry, and they’ve all been very excited about the potential for robotics to assist humans in dangerous, difficult, or dirty tasks.
Getting that input from cleaners and other rail service workers was essential when we started designing the technology. For example, they guided us towards the narrow
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