EVER noticed how road-sweeping trucks just seem to rearrange dirt and garbage
rather than removing it? Make the trucks smarter and they will do a lot better.
You just have to arm the vehicles with a laser, a digital camera and an
image-processing computer.
The problem with standard road sweepers, says Graham Parker at the University
of Surrey, is that they’re dumb. The settings for the brushes—the speed
and the force with which they’re pushed onto the road, for example—are
usually set at the beginning of a run and then left alone.
But some rubbish needs only light…
