Helsinki has its own robotic street cleaner, but you may not like its name

I also understand that to see it it looks like a giant Roomba, but being able in one fell swoop to copy a name and make me go through the water was no small feat.

For the first time, the robotic sweeper Thrombia Free of the Finnish company Trombia Technologies entered service on the streets of Helsinki (which I thought pretty clean even before). At the end of the year, the special cleaning machine had started a test period along a former railway transformed into a cycle path, the Helsinki-Baana.

Today it enters fully as part of the Helsinki garbage service, along the night streets in different districts of the city.

Thrombia! (but I say, can you?)

The robotic sweeper, as mentioned, is a cross between a huge autonomous vacuum cleaner and a lawnmower of about three meters with the conditional. And what's more it's called Trombia (sorry, I won't repeat the concept anymore. I work in advertising and I care a lot about naming, I can't believe it yet).

Trombia Free uses machine vision technology with the now ubiquitous LiDAR. With this "radar" the autonomous sweeper moves along roads and paths without fearing any stop whatsoever. The robot is for all seasons, it can avoid obstacles independently and work at any time of the day. Its average speed is limited to 2-6 km / h, however during the night hours it can accelerate (so to speak) up to a maximum of 10 km / h.

An ecological scavenger

The company said the Trombia Free robotic street cleaner uses less than 15% of its power to suck up debris and sweep, with a consumption ranging from 6 to 10 kW, unlike the diesel counterparts, which consume from 70 to 130 kW. The autonomous vehicle is equipped with proprietary 45 or 90 kWh batteries, designed for 8,5 - 17 hours of operation in economy mode or 4-8 hours in continuous mode.

I just hope that here in Italy it will arrive with another name: I don't know how the market would react to seeing a robot with a name like that, which broom by trade.