It’s long after the final bell has rung at Glover Middle School and all the students have gone home for the day, but a recent addition to the school is just beginning its solitary job cleaning its many hard floors .
“Wonderbot,” as the custodial team named it, is an automated cleaning robot that scrubs and polishes floors without needing a human to push it. It still requires custodial assistant Jason Huffman’s sentient touch, but he can start the machine and walk away to work on one of the other many duties a custodian must finish before kids return to school the next day.
“It’s like a little baby, you kind of got to baby it,” Huffman said, describing how he has to check up on the bot several times throughout its cleaning to replace water or get it out of a jam, for example…