Sweeping under control

The Integrated Circuit Design group (DCI), part of the Computer Architecture and Technology Department at the Informatics Faculty of the University of the Basque Country (Donostia- San Sebastian campus) have recently been awarded first prize at the II (2004-2005) Innovation and Knowledge Event organised by Festo-PNeumatic S.A., the multinational company working in the fields of pneumatics, hydraulics and industrial control.

The presented work, ‘Monitoring system for self-propelled sweeping machines and street cleaning planning’, has been designed and developed by DCI group researcher Néstor Ayuso, and led by Faculty members Gonzalo Álvarez and Carlos Amuchastegui with collaboration from Alfonso Gerendiain of the Kifer informatics services company. This work is part of a wider, joint-working project with this company on waste management planning.

It is basically a hardware/software system developed jointly by the university and the company; the hardware being developed by the research group and the software designed by Kifer informatics services. The system is equipped with a hardware module located on the sweepers and which is connected to the Internet by GPRS. The location of the sweepers is controlled at all times by means of a GPS navigator. Likewise, the state of the machine, its operating mode, and so on, is monitored by means of a series of sensors.

There is also a server-installed software application, the server also being connected to the Internet with ongoing reception of information from each street sweeper. The application enables the pin-pointing of all the street sweeping machines in real time on a map, stores each action carried out in each journey and assigns the cleaning tasks for the following journey as a function of previous actions and of other parameters as defined by the user.

This is not the first time that the work of this research group has been distinguished. They were awarded the Toribio Echeverría Technology Prize in 2004, as well as the Manuel Laborde Werlinden 2nd prize the same year.