Keeping bike paths and roads clear of debris is a necessary but thankless task for sanitation workers. The Robosweeper S1 from WeRide can work alongside street crews, or can work alone to quietly clean up day or night.
WeRide was founded in 2017 by the former chief scientist at Baidu's autonomous driving lab, and has operation centers in Silicon Valley, UAE, Singapore and China. The company has previously rolled out a L4 self-driving robotaxis, a robobus and a robovan.
Though autonomous vehicles have clocked up millions of miles around the world, the promise of a Johnny Cab in every city has yet to be realized - though they're more common in China than elsewhere thanks to the efforts of companies like AutoX and Baidu.
In the first half of 2022, WeRide announced that an autonomous road sweeper was being produced ahead of a large-scale test in the Nansha District of Guangzhou, China. The van-sized L4 vehicle didn't have a steering wheel, accelerator/brake pedals, could process data from onboard sensors thanks to NVIDIA's AI compute platform and was cloud-connected for remote scheduling, management and tracking.
That S6 model (seen to the right in the image above) has now been joined by a sleeker, smaller street crawler called the Robosweeper S1 – which has been designed for wet/dry clean up of "all scenarios on open roads," with parks, sidewalks, greenways, river banks and traffic lanes given as application examples.
The slow-moving electric vehicle measures 2,570 mm (101 in) in length (though its front brushes are not included in that calculation) and has a turning circle of 2.7 m (8.85 ft). It's built around We-Ride's well-tested autonomous driving platform comprising 360-degree sensors and cameras for all-around situational awareness, along with blind-spot detection, traffic signal recognition and static/moving obstacle avoidance smarts.
A full charge of its battery bank is good for a swept area of 120,000 m2 (1.3 million sq ft). The S1 hosts a 400-liter water tank plus a 240-liter trash bin, and can automatically offload its collected garbage at dedicated disposal points as well as return to base for a water top-up or battery recharge.
The launch in Guangzhou this week marks the start of commercial deployment of the autonomous sanitation technology, and WeRide reports a number of contracts for the S1 have already been secured. The promo video below has more.
Source: WeRide
