Large-scale cleaning in the Smart City of the future

The future is clean with Data, Drones and Swarm Robotics

Efficient infrastructure and an attractive living environment despite rising populations… Sparing use of resources despite higher demand… These key aspects highlight the challenges that communities are facing today. Moreover, in countries like Germany, large metropolitan areas are in increasingly intense competition for qualified workforces. The wider context of urban planning is therefore extremely complex, with smart cleaning only a small piece of the puzzle. Yet, behind the cleaning activities – in themselves unspectacular – lies a major contribution to the quality of life and health of the population. From smart data to drone support and swarm robotics, from sharing systems to pay-per-use and smart metabolism management: together with Dr Alexander Rieck from the Fraunhofer IAO (Fraunhofer Institute for Labour Economics and Organisation) and Dieter Lindauer from the Bundesverband Smart City e.V. (German Federal Association for Smart Cities), Kärcher experts examine how far technology has come, how large-scale cleaning in the cities of the future could look – and why smart recycling can unearth genuine treasures, even in street waste.

Data as the key to intelligent control:

Demand-actuated cleaning

The intelligent acquisition and linking of information provides countless opportunities to improve processes and make the economy more sustainable. One example from agriculture shows that data acquired in a targeted way is already contributing to optimum utilisation of water and fertiliser: agricultural drones are capable of recording the condition of fields using infrared imaging, and assigning the supply requirements to semi-autonomous tractors. These then prepare the required mixture of water and additives, which the farmer uses to treat his field as required. Servicing and machine management can be optimised in the same way for service providers with large machine fleets. Dr Karl Engelbert Wenzel, responsible for the pre-development of intelligent systems at Kärcher, explains: “With Kärcher Fleet and Kärcher Manage, we offer modern fleet and capacity management solutions that allow our customers to see, in real time and at all times, which machines and employees are active where, how utilisation can be improved and when servicing is required.”

These possibilities demonstrate that the leap towards demand-actuated cleaning on a large scale is no longer such a distant one. Dieter Lindauer, Chairman of Bundesverband Smart City e.V. and Manager of Stadtwerke Rodgau (Rodgau municipal utilities), explains why infrastructure like street lighting will play a significant role in this: “A major IT specialist offered to modernise the street lighting in the city of New York free of charge. This meant the possibility of equipping the masts with functions like fine dust measuring, frequency measuring or Park & Charge and making these available to other service providers.”

Other service providers could be municipal cleaners, who would be able to identify in real time which public spaces were experiencing a lot of footfall and therefore which required more cleaning, and where basic cleaning was sufficient.

Philipp Kipf, Product Manager Digital Solutions at Kärcher, adds: “If there are 300 people having currywurst at a snack stand at 12pm, but there are only two waste bins there, then it is likely that cleaning will be required afterwards. So I will take my cleaning vehicle to that precise spot.” Combined with increasing automation, networking could enable even more expansive scenarios in the future (see Showcase: A day in the Smart City .

Who cleans where and how? Drones, robots, automatic goats – what is and will be possible?

Increased automation of cleaning tasks in the public sector depends heavily on whether technical developments in the field of robotics can enable interaction with people, particularly since automation is not an end in itself, but a means of helping building service contractors to accomplish their cleaning tasks in the best possible way. Marco Cardinale, Head of Product Management Floor Care at Kärcher, describes the demands: “On the one hand, our customers are seeing increasing cost pressures, with labour costs accounting for around 80% of their expenses, and on the other hand labour is becoming increasingly difficult to find, and can be deployed more productively elsewhere. 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 so that they can reduce their overall cleaning costs.”

Cleaning robots for scrub vacuuming are at present economically viable on large, unobstructed surfaces that are not accessible to the public. The sensor technology must ensure environmental perception that guarantees safety. This will open up a whole range of possible applications, even on obstructed surfaces with public access.

These considerations highlight the fact that automation in city and infrastructure cleaning is not just a distant vision. Dr Alexander Rieck from the Fraunhofer IAO shows that the possibilities are limitless: “In order to ensure cleanliness in big cities in the future, small, efficient machines that are capable of performing various tasks and that operate autonomously and automatically will be most effective.”

For example, there are already solutions in buildings whereby mini-drones take off from a base station with small quantities of cleaning agent, fan out, clean and repeat the procedure until everything is clean.

For Dr Rieck, this vision goes even further: “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.”

Looking back to the 1990s, when Kärcher put a cleaning robot into operation with a pilot experiment at Amsterdam airport, it becomes clear just how fast technology is advancing. How quickly will a world with autonomous robots and drones be possible?

Dr Rieck adds: “There is a saying that I like very much: we overestimate what we will be able to achieve in the next two years, and underestimate what we will be able to achieve in the next 10 years. Camera perception, autonomous driving, storage technology, battery technology, sensor technology, smart data – these parallel developments are creating synergies that will allow us to make huge leaps forward across the board.”

From sharing to pay-per-use: new technologies, new business models

New technologies are not only having an effect on the way in which cleaning is carried out, but also on the processes themselves. With networking and real-time acquisition via apps and smart devices, the doors are open to completely new business models. Philipp Kipf explains: “It is conceivable that building service contractors will stop buying cleaning machines and instead book the cleaning services of a machine for 5,000 square metres of tiled surface. Pay-per-use concepts like this are coming, and the challenge now for all companies on the market is to embrace these opportunities and develop attractive solutions.”

Sharing, on the other hand, is well known from platforms like Uber, the online intermediary for private and commercial driver services, or airbnb, for private subletting of living space to travellers during your own holidays or trips abroad.

Although there is often fierce debate surrounding the issues of fair remuneration and where the limits of commercial approaches should lie, at the heart of this is the collective, and therefore efficient use of available infrastructure.

Indeed, this can be transferred in a meaningful way to the professional field. In this case, demand, for example the level of dirt on a street, could be recorded via sensors. This is then managed by (partially) autonomous cleaning machines from municipal sharing systems. The advantage of this is that the required cleaning technology is shared, where possible, and not purchased, serviced and operated over and over.

The big picture at a glance:

How cleaning and recycling interrelate

Sustainability as a major issue of the future completes the cycle from dirt prevention through demand-actuated cleaning to recycling that is as comprehensive as possible – even including street waste.

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 if the prices of these rare commodities continue to rise. Innovative ideas like this one demonstrate how smart the future could be and highlight the potential in all current developments.

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Showcase:

A day in the Smart City – vision of a clean city.

Dr Karl Engelbert Wenzel describes his scenario of a smart day

“Drones fan out to inspect the location, equipped with 3D cameras and GPS function. Via the cloud, they actuate municipal machines that then make their way to the location of use.

“On high-rise buildings, robots with suction pads move along the facades to clean the windows, but only where there is no self-cleaning infrastructure, for example roller shutters with a self-cleaning function. In office skyscrapers, building monitoring cameras provide information via spectral analysis about serious deviations from the desired situation, such as a leaking tub of yoghurt in the departmental kitchen.

“A swarm of cleaning drones carrying biodegradable cleaning agents is dispatched. For normal cleaning, air conditioning is used to take in dust particles via an ionised airstream. The waste collected by daily cleaning is automatically separated and recycled on-site, where possible. Only the residual waste is picked up by autonomous waste collectors. In residential skyscrapers, there are private wash systems in the underground car parks, where the driver gets out of the car and the car drives autonomously through the car wash and parks itself.

“Meanwhile, the resident can make their way to their apartment and hand over any remaining tasks to their humanoid service robot, who is capable of using tools. There are greenhouses on the mezzanine floors of the office skyscrapers, in which sensors monitor the moisture level of the soil and dispatch watering drones as required. Within the home, gamification of cleaning is on the rise, as everything is more interactive on the outskirts of the megacity.

“The vacuum cleaner logs who has used it and for how long, as well as how many dust particles were vacuumed. Points are scored for this, as well as for preparing meals using the semiautomatic food processor. Meanwhile, the electric broom keeps the terrace clean and the allotment can be cultivated effortlessly using watering sensors.

“After a long bike ride, the pedelec can be cleaned to a shine automatically in centrally accessible sharing facilities, while thanks to nanoparticles the active clothing has already cleaned itself.

“Come the evening, all of the cleaning machines are back at the charging station, apart from in those areas where it is best to clean at night – like in commercial areas that are not in full use at this time.”

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