City authorities in Espoo plan to roll out a commercial pilot of a full-power autonomous street sweeper from March 2021 onwards. A successful trial would mean the start of greener and more sustainable city cleaning with reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions.
“We are thrilled to start the pilot programme with the city of Espoo. When we think about the over 3 million CO2 metric tons of carbon emissions that high power diesel-fuelled suction street sweepers around the world produce annually, we see that smart cities around the world can act to reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions significantly by modernising the way street cleaning is done,” said Antti Nikkanen, CEO, Trombia Technologies.
The Finnish street maintenance technology developer reports its Free street sweepers use 85 per cent less energy than conventional vehicles.
During the pilot period in Mankkaa, a suburb of Espoo, autonomous functions and machine vision will be tested, as well as different ways to integrate the autonomous sweeper with other logistics.
Trombia Free units come fitted with an all-weather autonomous, lidar-based, machine vision technology that filtrates the noise coming from the environment in rainy, snowy or alternative conditions.
The unit’s algorithm development has been carried out to absorb data on objects from various sources and to generate millions of illustrations of the object at once. This enables accurate and safe localisation in all-weather conditions, claims Trombia.
Trombia Technologies has been developing the globally patented Trombia sweeping technology since 2013 and entered the market with sweeper attachments in 2017. The sweeper attachments are being sold in seven countries including North America and Northern and Central Europe.
The carbon free and autonomous product, Trombia Free, is expected to roll-out from the pilot programme to mass-deliveries in early 2022.