After global attention on the world’s first self-driving taxis making their debut in Singapore, why stop there? If the National Environment Agency (NEA) and the Ministry of Transport (MOT) could get their way, they’d have robo street cleaners roaming around the island 24/7.
No really, that’s what the government expressed explicit interest in. Both the NEA and the MOT have placed a call out for firms to propose making roving autonomous cleaning vehicles a reality.
The exact automaton they want is rather ambitious, according to the GeBIZ tender they put out. They specified that the self-driving multi-purpose utility vehicle should be able to collect rubbish and clean public pathways (even on bumpy surfaces), grass verges and muddy terrain. It should have safety features to avoid collisions and generate less than 50dB of noise. Vehicles could be designed to navigate private housing estates as well and collect trash from refuse bins for disposal at sites up to 100km away.
In other words, the NEA and MOT want a damn miracle bot that even Boston Dynamics — the world’s foremost robot makers — will struggle with.
Such grand ambitions will surely come with grand costs — and maybe the future hasn’t arrived yet to deploy dozens of robo street cleaners across the island. That’s not to say the technology doesn’t exist though; the Dustbot project has been ongoing since 2009.
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