Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about a robot that washes windows. We’ll also get details on the mistrial on the final charge against Harvey Weinstein.
The window-washing scaffold slid down the side of an office building the way window-washing scaffolds do. It stopped at the 23rd floor, and the two window washers onboard went to work.
Someone on the sidewalk below, looking up, might have thought they were guys in white hazmat suits.
They were not. They were robots.
Their long mechanical arms swept back and forth, scrubbing the glass with brushes that dispensed just enough water to clean away the grime without dripping on the floors below. The system, known as Ozmo, is safer and faster than human window cleaners — more than 60 percent faster, according to Ross Blum, the president and chief operating officer of the company that markets it.
“Repetitive tasks that are dangerous and dirty are rife for automation,” he said, adding that he had “a deep appreciation” for window washers and what they do. “It is a tough job,” he said. “It is a thankless job. It is manual labor at high elevations with variable weather conditions.”
Window-washing is a job that is an inherent part of the city — and is inherently dangerous. In February, firefighters rescued two window washers after their scaffolding swung wildly more than 70 stories above a building in Columbus Circle. There have been other incidents over the years and some fatalities.
Window-washing is also a job with high turnover. The online job listing site Zippia says that 35 percent of window cleaners last less than a year. Only 9 percent spend more than 11 years working as window cleaners. There is also concern that window washers are aging out: 75 percent are above age 40, according to Zippia. Blum argues that far from eliminating jobs, Ozmo “can increase the size of the work force by providing a safer way to perform the operation.”
Ozmo is not completely autonomous, although Blum hopes it will be someday. For now, it takes two people to run Ozmo, one less than a conventional window-washing crew would use.
When Ozmo is in operation, one person is on the scaffold, a “monitor” required for the system to comply with city regulations, Blum said. The monitor can stop the system if he believes something is going wrong. He cannot control the two robots, Blum said.
That can be done only by an operator on the roof, who has a laptop computer. Blum said the system goes through seven to 10 minutes of checks at the beginning of the day before the platform is moved over the side of the building. Ozmo itself recalculates its path, up and down for the platform and side to side for the brushes, hundreds of times a second.
It also has onboard cameras and sensors that keep the mechanical arms from punching the glass. “We understand how delicate glass can be,” Blum said.
For the same reason, still other sensors hold the force of the water to a drizzle: Ozmo does not do power washes.
Blum went into the building, at 1133 Avenue of the Americas, and took the elevator to a vacant floor where he could watch Ozmo move into position and clean the windows. Ozmo is not confined to only one building: Like conventional window-washers, the robots can move on to the next dirty skyscraper. “Building A this month, building B next month, building C the month after that,” Blum said.
Also on hand as Ozmo worked was Randy Howie, a co-founder of New York Robotics, a nonprofit network that champions what it sees as the city’s “next economic surge.” It says that the New York region has more than 100 robotics startups. But Howie said that robotics is more than a tech story. It is about the “future of the city’s industrial base,” he said, as well as jobs and “the builders, engineers, designers and operators that are quietly transforming the landscape.”
In New York, Blum’s company, Skyline Robotics, leases Ozmo to Palladium Window Solutions, which cleans the windows. Justin Leisenheimer, the president of Palladium, said there was no set price for deploying Ozmo. “It depends what type of building and what type of scaffold system is in place,” among other factors, he said.
To clean two windows, 1 minute 43 seconds
It took Ozmo one minute 43 seconds to wash two windows. Watching from the inside was like being in a car in a drive-through carwash. The robots have little orange lights that flash when they are moving. Blum said the brushes, with their black synthetic bristles, were slightly curved at the top and bottom, the better to deal with crevices and sills.
But there was no soap or chemicals. The water cleans away dirt by itself because it has been deionized. That also means that the windows will dry clear if the brushes leave droplets behind.
No need for a squeegee, Blum said.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day, with a chance of rain, and temperatures reaching the upper 70s. In the evening, the chance of rain continues, along with clouds and a dip to around 64.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth).
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” two Metro reporters — Dana Rubinstein, who covers politics in New York, and Mihir Zaveri, who covers housing — discuss the candidates in the June 24 Democratic primary for mayor. Also, the New York Historical marks the city’s 400th anniversary. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
How the Weinstein trial ended
The jury foreman said that he could not go back to the jury room. The judge said that the other jurors did not understand why the foreman had “bailed out.”
And the judge, Justice Curtis Farber, declared a mistrial on the final charge against the former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a day after the same jury had convicted Weinstein of one felony sex crime and acquitted him on another charge.
The mistrial, on a charge of third-degree rape, capped a retrial that had lasted nearly two months. Weinstein had been convicted of rape and a criminal sexual act in 2020, but his conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said after the mistrial that his office was committed to retrying Weinstein on the rape charge.
The deliberations had devolved into threats and yelling, with the foreman saying he had been pressured to change his vote, although Farber said the other jurors had not described the discussions in the jury room as heated. “They did not describe anything that rose to the level of threats,” he said.
The foreman, reached at his home after the verdict, declined to say how he would have voted on the final charge.
He sighed when he was asked if he had felt threatened.
“There were a lot of comments made,” he said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Tompkins Square Park
Dear Diary:
After clouds tumbled through the sky,
A sun-filled aura
Brought in the scent
Of hot pretzels,
And the afternoon light
Poured like liquid gold,
Onto East 10th Street,
Reflecting off the sunglasses
Of people gathering
Into Tompkins Square Park,
Mirroring the moment
Into an even brighter light,
Miniature suns around the words
Of Ginsberg
Slipping off the speaker’s tongue,
At the Howl! Festival, 2011,
And we just sat
Hanging like soldiers
On every word,
And then the day was over,
And we ran to make the bus
And “vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey.”
— Kathryn Anne Sweeney-James
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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