What is claimed to be the world’s first high-power autonomous street sweeper has launched in Helsinki.
Developed by Finnish street maintenance technology developer Trombia Technologies, the Trombia Free cleaning device is designed to be operated fully autonomously in all-weather conditions in smart cities and industrial destinations.
The battery-electric street sweeper reportedly uses less than 15% of the power required by currently available heavy suction sweeping technologies, which Trombia believes will help realise the potential for mass-electrification and carbon-neutralisation of one of the heaviest vehicle technologies in use in cities globally.
“We think about the over three million CO2 metric tonnes of carbon emissions that high-power diesel-fuelled suction street sweepers around the world produce annually,” said Antti Nikkanen, CEO, Trombia Technologies. “The current vehicle technology relies on suction performance that was invented in the 1950s. We simply cannot enter 2020s green and sustainable era with such an outdated solution.”
The zero-emission and autonomous Trombia Free is expected to be rolled out through a pilot programme starting in January 2021, which will focus on 10 different customer applications with the goal of developing a product and model range.
“Trombia Free was developed below-the-radar in pilots with the Nordic European parking lot operator Aimo Park and for harder conditions with piling machinery manufacturer Junttan’s industrial plants,” said Jaakko Happonen, founder of Trombia Technologies. “Now we move forward with increased focus on smart city sector.”
The company is also introducing a new pay-per-square metre business model to enable the rapid replacement of diesel-fuelled street sweepers by contractors and operators.
Equipped with an autonomous, lidar-based machine-vision technology that filtrates noise from the environment in rainy, snowy or alternative conditions, an advanced 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, which is said to enable accurate and safe localisation in all-weather conditions.
Trombia Technologies has been developing its globally patented Trombia sweeping technology since 2013 and entered the market with sweeper attachments in 2017, which are currently being sold in seven countries in North America and Northern and Central Europe.
Final product pricing will be made available at the start of pre-sales to Norwegian and German markets during summer 2021, with mass-starting deliveries commencing in early 2022.
