AUTONEWS

Chinese company WeRide launches robotic street sweeper

The Chinese company WeRide, participating in the support program for the NVIDIA Inception startup, launched 50 fully unmanned automatic sweepers on the streets of Guangzhou, called Robo Street Sweeper – “robotized street sweeper”. Autopilot systems are powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin platform.

The machines perform standard tasks: sweeping, watering road surfaces and spraying disinfectants. In addition to the autopilot system, they are managed by a centralized cloud platform that processes traffic data in real time and creates routes.

The task of the autopilot system on sweepers is by no means simpler than that of robot taxis or unmanned trucks: road cleaning is carried out in rather cramped conditions, so the artificial intelligence involved in management must do its job. with high precision.

Cleaners need to be able to navigate dense city traffic and navigate in low visibility conditions, including at night and early in the morning. Also, during cleaning, they must detect and classify objects on the road.

To solve all these problems, the machines process large amounts of real-time data from the integrated sensors. Processing is done through neural networks based on deep learning algorithms – they operate with representations, not mechanical sequences of actions to solve specific problems.

Chinese company WeRide has been developing autopilot systems since 2017. In 2019, it launched a public robotaxi service – since then, its cars have made more than 350,000 trips and transported 180,000 passengers; in January 2022, WeRide self-driving buses took to the streets as part of a pilot project.

AVnews/Image source: blogs.nvidia.com