WeRide Autonomous Street Sweepers Powered by NVIDIA
When it comes to safety, efficiency and sustainability, self-driving vehicles have a clean slate.
Autonomous vehicle company and Creation of NVIDIA Member WeRide launched a public road pilot of its Robo Street Sweepers this month. The vehicles, designed to perform round-the-clock cleaning services, are built on high-performance, energy-efficient computing from Nvidia.
The fleet of 50 vehicles sweeps, hoses down and sprays disinfectant in Guangzhou, China, all without a human driver behind the wheel. The robot sweepers run on a cloud-based fleet management platform that automatically schedules and dispatches vehicles using real-time daily traffic and route information.
Street sweeping is an essential municipal service. In addition to keeping dirt and debris out of the way, it helps ensure that trash and hazardous materials don’t flow into storm drains and pollute local waterways.
As cities grow, the application of self-driving technology to street cleaning vehicles allows these fleets to operate more efficiently and maintain cleaner, healthier public spaces.
Sweep Smarts
While street sweepers typically operate at lower speeds and in more constrained environments than robotaxis, trucks, or other autonomous vehicles, they still require robust AI computation to operate safely.
Street cleaning vehicles must be able to operate in heavy city traffic, as well as in low visibility conditions, such as at night and early in the morning. Additionally, they must detect and classify objects on the road as they clean.
To do this without a human being behind the wheel, these vehicles must process massive amounts of data from on-board sensors in real time. Redundant and diverse deep neural networks (DNNs) must work together to accurately perceive relevant information from this sensor data.
As a software-defined, high-performance AI computing platform, NVIDIA’s solution is designed to handle the large number of applications and DNNs running concurrently in autonomous vehicles, while adhering to industry standards. system security.
A range of models
The WeRide Robo Street Sweepers are the latest in the company’s stable of autonomous vehicles and its second purpose-built, mass-produced autonomous vehicle model.
WeRide has been developing autonomous technology on NVIDIA since 2017, building robotaxis, mini robobuses, and robovans with the goal of accelerating smart urban transportation.
Its robotaxis have already provided more than 350,000 rides for 180,000 passengers since 2019, while its mini robobuses began pilot operations to the public in January.
The company is currently building its next generation autonomous driving solutions on NVIDIA DRIVE Orinusing the high-performance AI computing platform to market its autonomous range.
And with the addition of these latest vehicles, WeRide’s fleets are ready to wipe the slate clean.