Experts' Corner

Robots make laundries smarter and safer

Sorting soiled garments is one of the routine tasks where the use of advanced technologies can reduce human interaction to an absolute minimum.

Robots pick up the individual laundry pieces from conveyor belts and transport them to RFID chip readers to identify and register each garment. Directly after that, an X-ray scanner automatically detects unwanted hidden objects in the pockets and rejects these contaminated garments. Only approved laundry articles are forwarded further to be sorted accordingly by the system.

Today, all these tasks can be performed by only a few operators who have to manually empty the pockets of the rejected garments.

Occupational safety through X-ray technology
The X-ray scanner also functions perfectly as a stand-alone device: it checks soiled laundry pieces for dangerous foreign items and creates a safe and efficient working environment. With X-ray technology, harmful foreign sharps such as needles, scissors, scalpels, etc. can no longer remain undetected in the pockets.

From human intelligence to artificial intelligence
However, humans are not that easy to replace, as the combination of body and brain is reasonably smart. Robots on the other hand, only do what you tell them to, and that is why building intelligent robots take the best people, you can find. When you have their brains at hand, you can begin working with artificial intelligence, AI.

AI is when you build a computer like a small brain. You teach it by giving it a lot of relevant data with the right solutions. The more patterns the computer can learn, the better. An example are systems based exclusively on visual sorting and mainly used for unmarked garments.

Almost all advances in AI have been made lately when specific input data is used to generate a simple response. If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it now or soon with the help of AI.

With these machines, laundries can perform more demanding and specialized tasks, where robots perform recurring tasks while human operators can take care of customer-related tasks.

The laundry industry is entering a new era in which technology can take over most production processes without human interaction. Together with our partner Inwatec, the JENSEN-GROUP is once again shaping the future of the laundry industry. These latest innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence increase the IQ and productivity in laundries.