Data and Robots
Philipp Kipf, Product Manager Digital Solutions, explains how Smart City of the future can always be clean.
What challenges do you see on the road to Smart City?
Data is our biggest challenge. We have to interpret it in a meaningful way, develop norms and standards, be mindful of data protection and above all consider how we make the data available, and to whom. Cities like Berlin and Hamburg already have open data source portals, which the public can use to develop service apps for the city, for example. One subdomain of this is the networking of machines produced by different manufacturers in order to manage fleets efficiently and comprehensively. Trucks, for example, provide data points via CAN bus so that I can record vehicles from different manufacturers on one system.
In terms of cleaning, how can data help?
What innovations are, in your view, conceivable?
In addition to smart data, robotics is sure to gain in importance. At Kärcher, we were already using robots in the early 1990s, but at that time people had not made as much progress and the machines were too big. Current developments show that we are definitely on the way to using robotics in everyday life. We will also have completely new business models, even at Kärcher. It is conceivable that building service contractors will stop buying cleaning machines and instead book the cleaning services of a machine for 5,000sqm of tiled surface. Pay-per-use concepts like this are the future, no question, and the challenge now for all companies on the market is to embrace these opportunities and develop attractive solutions.
Thinking about a vision for the future, how do you think the Smart City will look in terms of cleaning?
The cleaning of the future is connected and invisible. Bins will be connected to recycling stations via pressurised pipelines and will remove the rubbish automatically. The pavement will vacuum up leaves. The Smart City of the future is always clean, because everything is perfectly designed and networked.
In a smart city in 2025, I will be wakened up by a smart alarm clock. It knows my appointments schedule and takes into account my deep sleep phases and morning routine. The routine is all set. While I am out of the house, my vacuum robot takes care of the housework and then recharges itself when energy is cheapest.
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The city is in itself a very complex construct. In this respect, and with a view toward the “smart” future, we are dealing primarily with interdisciplinary issues. In Germany, we still have some work to do on that front, because in the relevant fields we are set up more according to discipline.
Dr Karl Engelbert Wenzel
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Philipp Kipf
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Building Clean
In conversation with Marco Cardinale, Head of Product Management Floor Care at Kärcher, on the demands of building cleaning and the secret of truly autonomous cleaning robots.
What do professional operators need in Municipal Cleaning?
Building service contractors today have two major issues to contend with: cost pressures on the one hand, with labour costs accounting for around 80% of their expenses. And owing to high staff turnover, among other things, there is also the expense of recruitment and induction. Our task is to provide the best possible support to building service contractors in their work and processes so that they can reduce their overall cleaning costs.
When it comes to efficiency, can cleaning robots make a difference?
For more complex areas of use like office cleaning, with many obstructed surfaces, cleaning robots cannot currently match the efficiency of a professional cleaner.
There are, however, many areas of application in which the use of a robot is conceivable and efficient with currently available technologies. This market is definitely big enough. Essential for us is 100% functionality and safety, especially if the robots are to be used in public spaces. The challenge is to intelligently link different technologies, which requires high-performance software.
What would your perfect cleaning robot look like, and where would it be used?
My vision is to have a cleaning robot that achieves maximum autonomy and that can be used on all surfaces 100% safely and economically. This would allow us to open up numerous fields of application, even in busy public areas.
Will there be intelligent cleaning robots?
Of course, a great many possibilities can result from combining digitisation, i.e. the smart networking of data, and automation, i.e. robotics. You can use data from weather services, for example, to determine cleaning demand. But I think in our industry we always have to look at what will actually bring our customers added value. This guiding principle also applies to comprehensive intelligence.
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My vision is to have a cleaning robot that achieves maximum autonomy with a variety of new technologies and that can be used on all surfaces 100% safely and economically. That would be the breakthrough that must be made in the next five years, and that current solutions have not yet made. This would allow us to open up numerous fields of application, even in busy public areas.”
Marco Cardinale
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Artificial Intelligence
Dr Alexander Rieck, Fraunhofer IAO (Fraunhofer Institute for Labour Economics and Organisation) talks about automatic goats, human impatience and how far we are from real artificial intelligence.
Thinking about the City of the Future – where does this road lead in your view?
There is no such thing as the one true “City of the Future”. For me the key question is why do people move to cities in the first place? In South America or Asia, this is linked with chances of survival, because outside the megacities there are very few ways of securing a regular income. It comes down to the simple fact that living together with other people opens up opportunities, and the higher the population density, the more opportunities there are from a statistical point of view.
An adequate living environment also requires cleanliness. Cities used to be regarded as dirty, but a lot has changed in this respect, at least in Europe. How can this be ensured in the future? What would we need? Small, efficient machines that are capable of performing various tasks and that operate autonomously and autodidactically will be most effective. Whether or not these operate as a swarm is not so important.
It is important to link individual process steps at the lowest level in order to make much better use of limited resources, as can be illustrated by the example of a traffic island: the island can be mown by a robot, a kind of automatic “goat”; our goat can use the biomass to generate energy, and simultaneously vacuum the fine dust or, thinking further into the future, perhaps even utilise it.
Have we come far enough now for developments to be within reach?
Today we have all of the elements we need for autonomous, networked systems: camera perception is now extremely good, innovations from the automotive industry in the field of autonomous driving are useful for us, storage technology and battery technology are being developed further, as is sensor technology and the processing of data in the field of smart data. All of these parallel developments in different areas are creating synergy effects that can be used to enormous benefit.
With these networked, autonomous systems, are we now moving into the field of Artificial Intelligence?
We talk about the moment of technological singularity, which has not yet been reached: the evolutionary stage at which the smartest person invents a machine that is smarter than humans. Because at that moment, the machine will be able to invent its own machines, and we will no longer, or only partially, be in control of the development. This was widely discussed when Big Blue won against the world chess champion. However, that was simple mathematics. Much more interesting is the fact that at the beginning of this year, a machine beat the world champion in Go – with a unique kind of creativity, and with moves that are not mathematically calculable. In this respect, it remains to be seen when we will have genuine AI.
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It is important to link individual process steps at the lowest level in order to make much better use of limited resources.
Dr Alexander Rieck
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e-Mobility
Dieter Lindauer, Chairman of Bundesverband Smart City e.V. and Manager of Stadtwerke Rodgau (Rodgau municipal utilities), about the interdisciplinary requirements of cities.
Smart City is a big concept. What opportunities and challenges do you associate with it?
We are dealing primarily with interdisciplinary issues. In Germany, we still have some work to do on that front, because in the relevant fields we are set up more according to discipline.
What fields are worth connecting?
We see four key fields. First of all, the energy sector. As a result of decentralisation, consumers are now becoming prosumers, i.e. consumers that are also producers.
What does that mean, what do intelligent networks look like, what business models do we need in the future?
The second field, mobility, is also changing. While local public transport is contending with cost optimisation and frequencies, e-mobility, for example, is on the way to getting a share of 5 – 10. The importance of mini vehicles will increase, as will car sharing in combination with autonomous driving. The third field is communication, in this context namely the transfer of the consumer world into the urban world. As with Androids, etc., we need a communication platform for the city, the Internet of Infrastructures. The fourth and final field is urban planning.
Do you have any real-life examples of this?
A very nice pilot project was carried out by a large automotive manufacturer and a parcel service. The vehicles communicated via GPS positioning where they were at the time the parcel was delivered. During the day, for most people that is at work, so in a company several hundred parcels can be delivered at once using this function. The recipient could even open his car boot via smartphone if he wanted. The result: we save time and, of course, fuel, because only one address needs to be stopped at.
Smart networking and use of information therefore result in new business models.
Are there also opportunities in more “down-to-earth” areas like city cleaning?
Fresh thinking, starting unusual cooperations – all of this is for me part of the Smart City, and that in turn covers all areas. When it comes to city cleaning, time used and productivity are what count. Semi-autonomous sweepers are absolutely conceivable for achieving better results. The subject of e-mobility can also be discussed, although range may still be an issue here. Cleaning on demand is also an interesting concept. The subject of metabolism, i.e. the issue of what to do with collected refuse, is particularly interesting to me. In 2015, a British company discovered an interesting approach. Street waste is filtered in a pilot facility in order to extract rare metals like palladium, rhodium and platinum. According to their own data, this generates 5kg per 50,000 tonnes of waste – a worthwhile model for the future if the prices of these commodities continue to rise.