The development self-driving vehicles is not just a topic for big car companies. A jam-filled donut Startup has picked out a special application that could free the capital from its grubby image.
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Friedhelm old man
July 19, 2018, 12:06 pm
We sweep for you: The self-propelled sweeper from Enway in action
(Image: Martin Wolf / Golem.de)
Berlin does not have the best reputation in terms of cleanliness of public streets and squares. The Berlin City Cleaners (BSR) fights with witty sayings on their garbage cans, on the other hand, but it can be so quickly no Munich conditions produce. For the startup Enway However, the dirty image was not the main reason to develop a self-propelled sweeper in Berlin. After a good one and a half years of development, the first prototype will soon be tested by private companies and municipalities.
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That is amazing. Because Enway has so far only a handful of employees. On the Euref campus in Berlin-Schöneberg the developers have only two small rooms available. An all-electric sweeper, which was recently acquired by the cooperation partner Bucher Municipal, does not even fit into the garage entrance. However, Enway co-founder Bo Chen is confident that he will be able to keep up with major corporations. Although at companies like Apple allegedly 5,000 employees develop software for autonomous vehicles.
Big differences to autonomous cars
Company founders Chen, Julian Nordt and Thanuja Ambegoda, all in their early thirties, were not deterred by the unequal opportunities. When they decided to found their own company about two years ago, they chose robotics. “Instead of starting the next pizza delivery service, we wanted to get into an area that will have a big impact on society over the next 20, 30 years,” Chen told Golem.de. Since Ambegoda is doing his PhD on image recognition at the ETH Zurich, the technical background is also given.
The fact that the ambitious goal of the development can be achieved, has several reasons for the 31-year-old business IT specialist. “We are benefiting from the whole development of the past five or ten years, many of which are proprietary, but many algorithms are also freely available,” says Chen. The Open Source Community be great. However, it is crucial that a sweeper has a completely different use case than self-propelled cars.
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While autonomous cars wanted to drive from A to B as quickly as possible, the opposite was the case with the sweeper. “It’s about accurately covering the area to be cleaned, which requires very different algorithms to plan driveways,” Chen says. “And you want to get as close as possible to obstacles so that you have the best possible cleaning result, which would not make a car happy.”
The Berlin startup Enway develops self-propelled sweepers such as the “Blitz”. (Photo: Martin Wolf / Golem.de)
In addition, the object recognition is clearly different from that in autonomous cars. “You have to recognize which objects I am allowed to return, and which ones I’d better not turn back, because otherwise the sweeper may be clogged or destroyed, or it may be a valuable item like a smartphone,” explains Chen. And of course, the machine should not suck a small dog. Finally, the software must also use the various sweeping functions correctly. For example, the adjustment of the brushes or the use of water nozzles. “These topics are not at all in autonomous driving,” says Chen.
Topics Pages:
Autonomous driving
automobile
Automotive
Berlin
electric car
lidar
delivery service
Park
Startup
Connected driving
science