After first unveiling a fully autonomous electric street sweeper last year, Finland's Trombia Technologies has taken to the streets of Helsinki as part of the Jätkäsaari Mobility Lab. This saw the Trombia Free begin operations along the Helsinki Baana bicycle lane as well as night-time street cleaning elsewhere in the city.

The Trombia Free has the look of an oversized robotic vacuum cleaner or lawnmower, measuring some 3.52 m long and 2.3 m wide (11.5 x 7.5 ft), though that can increase to 3 m with two gutter brooms added. But its job is to slowly move through city streets, cleaning as it goes.

Trombia Technologies

It makes use of LiDAR and machine vision tech to trundle around cleaning up city streets and pathways, is able to avoid obstacles on its own and can operate in all weathers, day and night. Though the electric street sweeper can get up to 10 km/h, it's limited to between 2 and 6 km/h (1.2-3.7 mph) for sweeping and dust removal operations.

The company says that it uses less than 15 percent of the power required by current heavy suction sweeping technologies, which shapes up as 6-10 kW of power for urban cleaning, where large diesel street scrubbers might each use in the region of 70-130 kW, according to Trombia.

Trombia Technologies

For regular urban street cleaning operations, the Trombia Free's battery is reckoned good for between 8.5 and 17 hours per charge, or between 4 and 8 hours for continuous high-power sweeping – 45.6- or 91.2-kWh Li-ion battery options are available.

The company expects to undertake up to 10 pilot programs ahead of pre-sales later this year and commercial availability in Q1 2022.

Source: Trombia Technologies