Best in-class cleaning robotics
The Tennant T7AMR has been recognized for its design with a 2019 Good Design® Award. The awards program, celebrating its 70th year, and organized by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design along with Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., recognizes and honors industry leaders in design and manufacturing that have created innovative products in the marketplace.
The winners of the award are determined by a jury of design professionals and industry specialists, and are judged on the quality of design, function, and aesthetics of the product.
The T7AMR was selected a winner in the Industrial category, alongside products such as a microplastics-sensing autonomous underwater vehicle, a robotic reach truck, and a vacuum chamber machine. There are a total of 29 categories in the Good Design Awards competition, including electronics, furniture, personal devices, pet products, and robotics.
Tennant Industrial Designers Peter Tabeling and Tou Yia Thao designed the T7AMR. The Industrial Design team worked together to design a variant of the T7 Micro Rider Floor Scrubber that integrated the autonomous technology and enabled the machine to be built with as many common parts as the T7 as possible, which helps achieve manufacturing efficiency, cost and part proliferation control, and simplicity of field service.
More than meets the eye
While the T7AMR won this award for its aesthetically pleasing design, it was also designed to operate safely in real-world environments, through cameras and sensors, and instill confidence in users and bystanders that the machine is safe.
As with our other products, sustainability and efficiency were also important intentional components for Tennant engineers when developing the T7AMR. The machine offers a run time of up to 3.5 hours and uses Tennant proprietary ec-H2O NanoClean™ technology, which electrically converts water into nanobubbles that provide a detergent-free clean that is healthy and safe for the environment.
Full team effort
A lot goes into the manufacturing of a robot — let alone a machine that will have close proximity with people, products and material. There were several challenges the designed team faced when developing the T7AMR.
“Our team created the T7AMR is less than 10 months, and during that time faced the significant challenge of integrating many sensors and cameras to take an existing, conventional scrubber and turn it into a robot,” said John Ickes, Director of Industrial Design and Innovation at Tennant company.
“Aesthetically, the goal was to update the look of the machine to the current Tennant Visual Brand Language, but still harmonize with the carry-over components. The fact that the end result received a 2019 Good Design Award makes the team’s efforts all the more gratifying. We are proud of the whole development team’s effort to create a product that integrates autonomous technology in a way that our customers find inviting and easy-to-use.”