German outfit Kärcher, a manufacturer of pressure washers, vacuum cleaners and industrial floor cleaners, has signed with Deutsche Telekom to supply global IoT connectivity to its “autonomous robot scrubber drier” machines in international markets. The family-owned firm is fitting new robot scrubbers with a global LTE SIM from the Germany-based operator to issue data to the cloud for fleet management purposes.
Specifically, Kärcher is connecting its new Kira B 50 scrubber drier to a cloud-based fleet management system to enable building service providers and facility managers with a view of their machine fleets, including deployment locations, work schedules, activation status, fill levels, and battery status. Users can also be notified by email or text message in the event of malfunctions, and software updates for troubleshooting can be issued over-the-air.
The Kira B 50 is sold to production and storage facilities, supermarkets and shopping centers, and also hospitals. It navigates autonomously by means of a number of optical and acoustic sensors. Deutsche Telekom said it is supplying an “industrial-grade” SIM to the firm, which can be built into a wireless module during the robot’s production, and also retrofitted into other Kärcher cleaning machines.
Kärcher has 150 subsidiaries in 80 countries; the Deutsche Telekom SIm works in them all. Deutsche Telekom said its flexible IoT tariff can be adjusted to meet the specific requirements of different Kärcher device families – if Kärcher chooses to connect other products (which appears to be the plan). It is unclear from the statement if the connectivity is pure-plat LTE-only, or if the strategy is to utilise LTE-based low-power wide-area NB-IoT and LTE-M, as available.
Alina Seitter, product manager for robotics at Kärcher, commented: “The feedback from our customers was clear and unequivocal: what they wanted was remote access to their machines and to view the status of the machines. They also wanted to receive error reports immediately by smartphone and to download digital cleaning reports. Our key account customers [also] often demand extensive device tests in different countries… [This] IoT connectivity enables us to do all of that.”
