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Intelligent control of debris clearance systems on sweeping vehicles

The clearing of debris from road surfaces is a major task for many industrial and service sectors. Surface sweeping applications range from debris removal during road construction and re-surfacing applications to general street and pavement cleaning operations. The existing vehicles available for these purposes have evolved in their design over several decades and place most control requirements upon the vehicle operator, whose main task is to steer the vehicle while supervising manual adjustments to the sweeping process. This leads to sweeping inefficiency and excessive brush wear with the power transmission system often working in a non-optimal setting leading to unacceptable emissions.

MSRR

We have a current EPSRC funded project whose aim is to provide the next generation of environmentally sensitive semi-autonomous cleaning vehicles with the capability of effective automatic debris sweeping. This will require a fundamental understanding of brush technology and how sweeping and collection is achieved, which will benefit a wide range of sweeping applications. Cleaning performance will be investigated by two distinct approaches. Firstly, by making the brush mechanism responsive to local road conditions close to the brushes using adaptive and predictive control. Secondly, by making the system responsive to predetermined debris position and classification data from a sensor at the front of the vehicle.

MSRR people involved with this work are :- Prof. Graham Parker, Maarten Michielen, and Gareth Peel .

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These pages are administered by Maarten Michielen (m.michielen@surrey.ac.uk)
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Last change: April 2000