Chinese car maker Shangchi has launched two self driving and autonomous road sweepers. The SC-120A is an unmanned automatic road sweeper, while the SC-120B is for manned, autonomous intelligent sweeping.

The road sweepers are designed for quieter operation and improved cleaning performance. Their autonomous features are designed to reduce or eliminate entirely a sweeper’s crew, typically 7 to 8 people.

Lidar-based, machine vision technology enables the driverless model to operate in typical environments.

The sweepers have two primary operating modes, cleaning and litter-collecting, and can be used for 10 hours at a time or until full.

Mr. Wangfeng Yan, Chief Executive Officer of Tantech, said, “The sanitisation market is long overdue for major innovation to increase performance and lower operating costs. It is common to find sweepers still using inefficient, suction technology designed 70 or so years ago requiring expensive, heavy power consumption. We are very excited about the potential for both of our new, state-of-the-art models, which are capable of delivering a higher return on investment to the government organisations, cleaning services and businesses that we are targeting. Both vehicles are undergoing pilot programmes, with mass production planned for the first half of 2021. Initial sales are expected to be primarily in the domestic China market, followed by international demand in Europe and North America.”

Mr. Yan continued, “The move to develop special use vehicles follows changes in China’s national subsidy policy to encourage usage of new energy vehicles and the application of unmanned operation of special use vehicles. We developed very attractive, feature rich vehicles that integrate information collection technology, data analysis systems, artificial intelligence controls, positioning and navigation systems, automatic actuators, and safety assurance technology. Our innovative street sweepers integrate highly intelligent route learning and memory, and real-time deep learning, in order to facilitate assisted driving or driverless driving.”