CINCINNATI — We’ve seen robots deliver food, vacuum floors, cut the grass and now you can add cleaning the airport to the list. A group of Ohio engineers created a robot they describe as a "Roomba for the airport runway."

What You Need To Know

  • Four engineers teamed up to start at company called Airtrek Robotics out of University of Cincinnati's Innovation lab 

  • The group created a robot attached to a wide mat that can detect and clear away debris from runway airports 

  • So far, they've had interest at airports out of state but hope to have it in Ohio airports at soon as next year 

As many are taking off on their holiday vacations, there’s little known risks in the form of debris on runways that could leave planes grounded. Just ask engineer Chris Lee.

“Zipper pulls, screws or even small rocks can be a significant threat to the aircraft safety because the when it gets sucked into the jet engines, it can severely damaged the aircraft or sometimes even cause fire on the challenges," said Lee. 

He’s one of four engineers from a start up company called Airtrek Robotics, trying to do something about the problem. 

Engineer Jon Taylor said the idea started in his garage, and ended up at University of Cincinnati’s Innovation Hub, a hub for start up businesses.

It’s where they built this robot that identifies debris in real time and automatically clears it off airport runways using a mat to clear debris and what engineer Huzefa Dossaji said are multiple sensors and cameras.

The team said it took them about a year to get to where they can make runway robot can "think" on its own.

"If a light or a camera has a weakness of a seeing and snow or something, maybe your radar can penetrate through the snow and see little objects and things like that. so a combination of these things help us, help us identify what we call 45 foreign object debris in the in the airport environment," said Dossaji. 

But there’s still some things engineer David Ladnier said they’re working through.

“Some of the things they wanted to look at is lowering the center of gravity and having a suspension longer battery life and working towards a product with all of the electronics and devices on board talking to each other," said Ladnier. 

So far they’ve been able to get investors and interest at airports out of state where you might just see a robot that can clear the runway itself.

The group hopes to have the runway robot up and running at airports in Ohio as soon as next year.