Maintaining a wooden deck in your home is both expensive and time-demanding. If you don’t keep up with regular maintenance, it will become even more expensive and time-consuming to repair – or it will eventually rot and fall apart. We have robots that can mow our lawns and clean our floors. Isn’t there supposed to be a deck-maintenance robot?
Gal Frenkel had the same thought. He decided to build it himself after searching for something that could help him keep his deck under check for weeks. As a result, RoboDeck!
RoboDeck is one of 20 startups competing in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield this week, winning $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. The simplest way to describe what RoboDeck is creating is to say, “Roomba, but for resealing your deck,” but according to Frenkel, that hardly scrapes the surface of what they’ve had to work out.
They’ve had to come up with solutions to be ultra-precise and consistent about how they’re spraying and applying sealant, and because every deck is different, they’ve had to develop their own mapping/routing technology to ensure they can cover an entire deck without rolling right through a section that’s just been sealed. It needs to recognize where the corners and drops are, just like a robot vacuum, and avoid them accordingly… However, it must be intelligent enough to recognize that not every small gap between boards is the start of a step.
They’ve also created their own sealant, which allows them to get greater coverage with less product, and unique spray nozzles to match their demands while keeping prices down. According to Frenkel, RoboDeck is intended to be sold as a subscription service. Rather than purchasing the bot entirely, you pay a monthly charge for the bot as well as a consistent supply of stain cartridges. The cost is decided by the amount of stain you require, which is governed by the size of your deck, local weather patterns (you won’t be able to run the bot if your deck is covered with snow, for example), and other factors.
He further claims that on a single cartridge/charge, this prototype can currently sustain a deck of up to 500 square feet. They’re working on a docking station for decks larger than that, which will refuel the bot and automatically replace a staining cartridge up to three times.
