109 As well as an operations partner, Platinum is also the first major customer for the Ozmo. The company provides services including window cleaning and maintenance for what it says are more than half of the Class A commercial buildings in Manhattan and the New York Metropolitan area. On 31 October 2023, Skyline announced its second major customer and new partner Principle Cleaning Services, which provides corporate commercial cleaning in London. “Our business model is to partner with leading window cleaning companies in their regions,” Blum explains. “We want to partner with people that have existing customers and that already have great relationships with their local regulator, that have the necessary insurance policies, and, candidly, have the workforce, because we don’t want to have sales and marketing staff who need to go to every single building on the planet. We want to focus on being a technology company.” The arm and machine vision At the heart of the system is the waterproof version of Kuka Robotics’ Agilus-2 six-axis robotic arm. Designed originally for use in a range of manufacturing environments, the Agilus-2 can be mounted on floors, walls or ceilings and at any angle. The arm weighs about 51 kg and has a footprint measuring 320 x 320 mm. It has a maximum reach of just over 706 mm and a payload of 6 kg. Compared with other versions of the arm, it has additional interior seals, more robust surface treatments and stainless steel covers instead of plastic. Incorporated to enable the arm to operate in wet and dirty production environments, these protective features allow it to meet IP67 ingress protection standards and make it suitable for applying water to windows in all weathers. The Ozmo’s machine vision system processes information from onboard cameras and an Ouster OS1-6 Lidar to work out its precise location and direction of movement relative to the building’s facade and the window it is cleaning. Together they provide data to algorithms written in-house that produce a 3D map of the facade and generate instructions to control the arm and the cradle. While Skyline refers to the process that enables the Ozmo to find its way around the building facade as SLAM, it is using the term in a general sense to characterise a method that includes a localisation component and a mapping component, rather than any specific simultaneous localisation and mapping technique. Tactile feedback The robot also has what is in effect a sense of touch that allows it to apply enough pressure to the glass to clean it properly without the risk of cracking it. This feedback is provided by a set of OnRobot Hex 6-axis force/torque sensors. Further, algorithms use data from inertial and other sensors to respond to gusts of wind and keep the robot stable in highly variable conditions, and the operator can always stop the system remotely at any time. The cleaning water supply passes through an Ionic Systems QuattRO reverse osmosis filtration and deionisation system, which contains a number of complementary filters. These include a carbon filter that removes chlorine from the water to protect the reverse osmosis (RO) membrane, a 5 micron filter that removes all particles above that size, the RO membrane itself that removes 98% of remaining impurities and a de-ionisation filter. An inline water softener is recommended for hard water areas to remove calcium, which can degrade the performance of the RO filter and cause it to fail prematurely. The QuattRO feeds the water to a cleaning brush specially designed for the Ozmo. Although the Ozmo is not intended to be a cobot (a robot designed for direct human interaction), operators have to set it up for every job, so it is fitted with the Airskin Skyline Robotics Ozmo | Digest Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2024 The Ouster OS-1 family of Lidars, which helps Ozmo map the facades of high-rise buildings as it moves, is based on an 865 nm eye-safe laser (Courtesy of Ouster)
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