Street cleaning in China is to become high tech as Yangzhou Lingtan Environmental Protection Technology, a Chinese startup that had only been around since January 2018, has their self-driving street sweepers already scheduled for mass production.
The company is offering its product to building management companies, cleaning service providers and government organizations.
According to Yangzhou Lingtan, there are close to 500 million globally who are into cleaning as their profession.
China's annual sales of cleaning services in its regional cities alone reach 200 million yuan ($28 million).
With the existence of 3,000 cities, the potential in China's market is at 600 billion yuan.
CEO Chen Shuo said this street sweeping driverless technology trumps self-driving ones because it replaces the work capacity of eight to 10 people and can work up to 10 hours or until the truck is full.
Likewise, without the need for major alterations, Yangzhou Lingtan's street sweepers' sensor technology makes the invention usable anywhere in the world.
The startup's AI algorithms are based on visual data only making it cheaper.
With its camera and video processor, its artificial intelligence is capable of 30 trillion calculations and can analyze 400 images per second.
Its location estimation algorithms analyze the location and distances of close to 4,000 objects per second making it capable of recognizing burnable waste, glass bottles and plastic bottles for the best cleaning method.
There's no need for a separate garbage collection truck as the startup's vehicle does cleaning and litter-collecting.
With engineers from a cleaning company, Yangzhou Lingtan was able to come up with the needed hardware and software.
Its three-month pilot project in Jiangsu Province won the company a contract to develop 200 trucks.
Plans at year's end include providing lease services, having a newer generation of its street sweeper to which the company will sell as well.
The lease price is 0.025 yuan per sq. meter with an estimated coverage of 1,500 sq. meters in an hour.
A person can clean 200 sq. meters in an hour and has an hourly rate of 20 yuan.
Chen said per unit cost is 300,000 yuan for a lot of 1,000 vehicles.
This amount can go to as low as 200,000 yuan per unit for 10,000 vehicles and even 10,000 yuan per unit for 100,000 vehicles.
He projects the company will be able to recoup costs just this year.
Yangzhou Lingtan is targeting global sales of 100,000 vehicles and is looking now for investors for its next-generation model of street sweepers.
Likewise, the startup is planning to develop algorithms for fire engines, military, and security self-driving vehicles and snowplows.
