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Govt exploring use of self-driving vehicles for street cleaning

SINGAPORE — Roving self-driving vehicles could travel around the island to keep streets spick and span, with the National Environment Agency (NEA) and the Ministry of Transport (MOT) on Monday (Oct 17) calling for firms to propose how they would do this.

SINGAPORE — Roving self-driving vehicles could travel around the island to keep streets spick and span, with the National Environment Agency (NEA) and the Ministry of Transport (MOT) on Monday (Oct 17) calling for firms to propose how they would do this.

Spelling out the scope of the Request for Information (RFI) exercise, the authorities are seeking views on the design and development of such self-driving multi-purpose utility vehicles (MPUVs).  

These MPUVs could be monitored by an on-site operator or tracked remotely, using live footage, GPS and short reports with photos of areas cleaned. 

They should be able to clean public pathways while maneuvering uneven surfaces, grass verges and muddy terrain, and be equipped with safety features to avoid collisions. 

These vehicles could also be designed to be able to collect rubbish, navigating private housing estates to locate and collect rubbish from refuse bins, and disposing them at authorised disposal sites up to 100km away.

The vehicles should generate less than 50dB of noise and not cause light pollution during operations. 

In a press release on Monday, the NEA and MOT said the information gathered could be used as part of preparations for subsequent procurement for trials and demonstrations. 

“In the longer term, boosting the productivity levels in the delivery of public services will bring about cost and time savings and better deployment of manpower resources,” they added. 

Currently, the cleaning of public areas is carried out manually by a cleaner or semi-automatically: Either by a mechanical road sweeping vehicle (MS) for public roads, or a pavement sweeper vehicle which cleans pavements. An MS can cost S$300,000 to S$500,000, while a pavement sweeper vehicle can cost between S$45,000 and S$60,000. 

However, challenges exist. For instance, the driver of the pavement sweeper vehicle would have to occasionally come down from his vehicle to remove bulky items, sweep corners that the vehicle cannot reach, or use an extendable hose to vacuum inside the bushes. 

As for refuse collection in landed residential premises, shop houses and trade premises, this is done with Rear End Loader (REL) trucks. Crew members attach the refuse bins left outside the units to a bin lifter at the rear of the REL, which then hoists the bin up an empties it. 

Each vehicle costs about S$250,000 to S$350,000. Navigating these vehicles are more complicated, with the need to be wary of parked vehicles, traffic and other road users and pedestrians, and carry out three-point turns at cul-de-sacs, noted the authorities. In other countries, the automation is partial, where the vehicle is still manned by a driver, but the bins are lifted with robotic “arms”.

The NEA and MOT said the road-cleaning vehicles could cover one-north, which is already a test bed area for self-driving vehicles, and its surrounding housing and commercial estates. But proposers can propose alternative sites with “relevant justifications and considerations”, they added. 

Deploying autonomous vehicles in such a capacity would likely be easier than for other functions, National University of Singapore transport researcher Lee Der-Horng felt. Cleaning vehicles would likely follow a set path to perform its duties, causing less disruption to other cars on the road, he said, adding that the traffic situation here is not as “chaotic” in as other countries. But “steep costs” could pose a roadblock, as such technologies are not widely available yet.

SIM University senior lecturer Walter Theseira said such automations in cleaning technology could help “substitute for increasingly expensive manpower costs”, especially when such jobs are perceived as relatively less desirable. 

But despite numerous innovations like cleaning robots, the cleaning sector has been one of the “most difficult areas to automate” as the current technology is focused on specific tasks. 

“A street sweeping vehicle might be readily able to cope with following a set path and ordinary road debris, (but) it might have challenges dealing with unexpected problems such as clearing tree debris after a storm or road debris after an accident, whereas a human work crew could readily do that,” Dr Theseira said.

Whether self-driving vehicles would be embraced by the cleaning sector would boil down to the “relative costs”, especially as the aim is to “get the job done at the lowest cost”, he added. 

Submissions for the RFI, which is listed on Government procurement website GeBiz, must be made by Dec 28.

The RFI is in line with recommendations made by the Committee on Autonomous Road Transport for Singapore in 2014, which identified four areas suitable for such technology: Fixed and scheduled mass transport services, on-demand services, freight transport, and utility operations like road sweeping and refuse collection. 

Other projects underway include the a trial by the MOT and Sentosa Development Corporation and ST Engineering of self-driving shuttle services across Sentosa since late last year.

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