The Chinese company successfully developed unmanned road sweepers

A Chinese company has just come up with a new way to take advantage of self-driving vehicles: sweeping the road.

Yangzhou Lingtan Environmental Protection Technology , which was just established in January 2018, has developed a driverless road sweeper and is planning to sell it to cleaning service providers, building management companies, and government organizations.

There are currently about 500 million people in the world doing cleaning jobs. In China, the annual turnover of cleaning services reaches US $ 28 million in urban areas alone. With about 3,000 cities, the domestic market is extremely large, possibly up to 600 billion Yuan.

Road sweeping is a business model that has an advantage over other self-driving technology services because self-driving vehicles can do the job of 8 to 10 people, according to the company's founder and CEO. is Chen Shuo. In areas such as taxis and transportation, self-driving vehicles can only replace the job of one or two people.

In addition, unmanned road sweepers can be used around the world without having to make major adjustments to adapt to each area, because the nature of this cleaning work is similar. . That means the company's self-driving road sweepers can be delivered to customers outside of China.

Chen says the company's sensor technology is what makes them different from their competitors. Yangzhou Lingtan uses AI algorithms based on a single type of visual data. As a result, their systems are much cheaper than other companies' AI programs, which incorporate many different types of sensors, including expensive radars.

Yangzhou Lingtan's vehicles are equipped with a camera and a video processor. With AI, they can perform 30 trillion calculations and analyze 400 images per second. Combined with algorithms that estimate the position, position and distance of nearly 4,000 objects can be analyzed per second.

This means that Yangzhou Lingtan vehicles can identify many types of waste, such as plastic bottles, glass bottles, and flammable wastes to provide the best cleaning method. These vehicles have two functions - cleaning and collecting garbage - so there's no need to deploy separate types of garbage trucks. Street sweepers can operate for 10 hours or until the container is full of garbage.

Yangzhou Lingtan hired a team of engineers from a cleaning company, allowing them to develop hardware and software, as well as refining truck models.

Photo of a car cleaning the road of Yangzhou Lingtan.

After 3 months of testing in Jiangsu province, the company has signed contracts to develop 200 such road sweeping trucks. They plan to start providing rental services, and introduce a new generation of road sweepers later this year. Besides leasing, it can also sell cars if needed.

According to the company, the rental price per car will be about 0.025 Yuan / square meter, and they estimate that each car can operate within 1,500 square meters for 1 hour. For comparison, a person can only clean 200 square meters an hour with a salary of 20 yuan / hour - 0.1 yuan / square meter.

Chen said his company now costs 300,000 yuan a car for 1,000 cars, but that the cost will be reduced to 200,000 yuan for every 10,000 cars and 10,000 yuan for 100,000 cars. The company will recover all costs this year and aims to achieve global sales of 100,000 vehicles in the next five years. Yangzhou Lingtan is currently seeking investors to produce the next generation of vehicles.

The company also plans to develop algorithms for firefighting, snow removal and self-driving vehicles in security and military industries.