It couldn't be any easier to program a self-driving floor scrubber from Tennant Co. You just punch a button and then drive it yourself on your preferred route.
At the controls, it's a little like operating a riding lawn mower. After looping around a few shelves in a little store set up in Tennant's R&D center and doing a tight 360-degree turn around a column, I stepped off the Tennant T7 scrubber and let the product manager punch another button. Then we all stood back and watched.
It was this second trip around the little store that was amazing. All by itself, it traced precisely the same loopy route. It only deviated when Tennant CEO Chris Killingstad placed an oversized Goldfish cracker box in its path, allowing him to show off the machine's ability to see and drive around obstacles.
Even if you knew nothing about the global market for cleaning machines, you had to assume somebody was working on a gadget like this, what with news every day about self-driving cars and other robotic innovations. The appeal here is pretty clear, too, because the biggest part of the cost to keep a hospital complex or shopping mall clean is paying people to do the work.
This Tennant project is also a reminder of what's often true about the adoption of these kinds of technologies. The machines embraced by mainstream customers rarely seem to be cool, ground-up inventions.
Entrepreneurs in robotics could try getting into the cleaning machine market, of course. But while they have cool software or other technology, they also would need to be as good at building reliable floor-cleaning machines as Tennant. It's had nearly a 90-year head start at that.
Just like Ford Motor and BMW need to be the Ford and BMW of the self-driving car market, the Tennant Co. of the autonomous floor scrubber market had better be Tennant, or else it will have blown what appears to be a big opportunity.
Killingstad led the way earlier this month from his office on Tennant's Golden Valley campus over to the R&D center, with plans for the autonomous machine to be the last stop. It was clear, though, that Killingstad wanted to put the new machine into the context of a much longer story.