Autonomous Precision: Bringing Robotics to Professional Floor Sanding

Plenty of good product ideas stall in the gap between a first prototype and something you can put in front of investors, especially when the concept spans mechanics, hardware, and software at once. That is exactly where Nordic Floor Robot found itself: with an early concept for an autonomous robot that retrofits onto existing sanding machines and takes over the heaviest part of the job, but no clear route from prototype to product. As R&D partner, IPU brought mechanical, hardware, and software engineering into a single team and delivered a functional, investor-ready demonstrator on a short and ambitious timeline.

Professional floor sanding is skilled, physically demanding work, and it always runs in two passes: a heavy first pass across the open floor, then a finer pass along edges and corners. For commercial clients, the whole job, from prep through several grit levels to the final finish, must fit inside a single weekend so the space can reopen on Monday. The real bottleneck was people. Finding enough skilled operators to deliver this short, high-intensity work reliably was becoming the limit on how much the business could take on. The founders had a concept, a first prototype, and a firm constraint: the robot had to retrofit onto sanding machines already used across the industry, not replace them. But they had hit technical roadblocks they couldn't get past on their own and brought in IPU to turn the vision into something demonstrable.

IPU stepped in to take the project from concept to a functioning demonstrator, working closely with the founders to translate an ambitious vision into technical requirements that were realistic to build without diluting the ambition itself. From there, IPU took cross-disciplinary responsibility for mechanics, hardware, and software. On the mechanical side, that meant engineering custom couplings to connect the robot to different models of sanding machine. On the hardware side, it meant redesigning the internal electronics and adding onboard compute to act as the robot's control unit. The software spanned motor control and drivetrain communication, together with an intelligence layer for safe autonomous navigation, including real-time collision avoidance and complete, unsupervised coverage of a room's floor.

The collaboration produced a functional prototype that can: - Navigate and sand a room autonomously, without operator intervention - Work with two different sanding-machine models via custom mechanical couplings - Sand across multiple grit levels as part of a multi-stage finish - Detect obstacles and avoid collisions reliably, in real time This is a demanding thing to get right. A sanding machine is a fast, heavy, rotating tool that generates large dynamic forces as it moves across an uneven floor, which makes it one of the harder robotic use cases to control safely. Delivering it as a working demonstrator gave clear, tangible proof that an autonomous platform can operate such a machine with precision and control.