For the first time in nearly 18 months, delighted football fans are allowed to return to their beloved stadiums to watch, feel and fully experience live football once again. In light of this exciting return to sport, Tottenham Hotspur stadium has become the first in the world to use a new revolutionary robotic cleaning company to help keep supporters, staff, and players, safe from coronavirus.
With a capacity crowd now returning to the 62,500-seater stadium for matches from this month and coronavirus still posing a threat, despite vaccinations and falling cases, it is vital that events such as these are run with the utmost caution and safety in order to allow them to continue to run. For spectators this means they must have either been double-vaccinated or have received a negative lateral flow test in the last 48 hours.
However, the Club itself also has a responsibility to ensure that the stadium is kept clean and safe at all times for everyone to use. With so many touchpoints, such as door handles, hand rails and plastic seats, and with so many spectators attending, the chances of risking and spreading COVID-19 are still high. With this in mind, the Club has introduced a fleet of Eco Bot 75 cleaning robots, designed by ICE Co-Botics. These robots will be used to clean and disinfect large areas of the stadium, whilst valuable labour resources can continue to focus on sanitising and deep cleaning vital areas such as the touchpoints previously mentioned.
The self-driving machine is able to plan its own path, which makes cleaning large areas within the stadium much easier and more efficient. It also has its own real-time obstacle avoidance and auto-resume after interruption. The front brushes can rotate 270 degrees and edge to edge cleaning is provided as the Eco Bot 75 cleans as close as 4cm away from corners and edges.
ICE is the UK’s largest provider of cleaning equipment, working across 28,500 sites and managing 96,000 machines across the country. ICE Co-Botics invest in the best cleaning equipment and technology to provide a ‘wide range of future friendly cleaning solutions.’ The Eco Bot 75 is a key example of this; it is environmentally friendly in that it is designed so that it can operate for six hour stints continuously on a single power charge. It also has a state-of-the-art four stage filtering system that ensures 70% of the water it uses is filtered and recycled, without affecting the standard of the cleaning that it does. Already, just by using the Eco Bot, Tottenham has saved more than 1,300 litres of water in its cleaning.
The introduction of these eco-friendly robots comes in conjunction with Tottenham Hotspur being named the Premier League’s greenest club in January this year. This was following a study carried out by the UN-backed Sport Positive Summit and BBC Sport, having implemented a huge range of sustainable measures across its stadium and trading centre. Tottenham were awarded this accolade for gaining more points than all the other clubs across eight separate categories. For example, the Club achieved 100% certified renewable energy and zero scope 2 emissions, and carbon dioxide emissions are around 50% less than a stadium built 10 years ago. As well as the introduction of the Eco Bot 75s the Club has put different technologies in places across the training centre and stadium, including solar panels and air source heat pumps.
The Head of Stadium Operations at Tottenham Hotspur, Paul May, commented that ‘’Co-Botics allow us to enhance our staff performances, making the cleaning operation even more thorough and covering vaster areas in a shorter amount of time. As matches and events return to our stadium, it has never been more important to ensure we have a clean and safe environment for our fans.”
Read more about the ICE Eco Bot 75 here.