Control System for an Automated Electric Street Sweeper Cleaning System

Keeping streets clean in large urban areas requires a lot of human labor, which is costly, and there is a constant problem - the lack of workers willing to take on this difficult task. In this paper, we describe a control system for an all-electric street sweeper whose goal is to automate the operation of a cleaning rig and allow the vehicle, controlled by a human driver, to follow the curb and adjust the position of the cleaning brushes to compensate for the driver’s deviations from the "ideal" cleaning path. Due to the use of hydraulic actuators, hysteresis controllers were chosen to control the basic functions of the cleaning system (control of the brushes and control of a suction area). A pure pursuit algorithm was used to control the curb following with cleaning rig. The results obtained in a Gazebo simulator showed good responsiveness of the vehicle control system and its readiness for experiments with the recently announced Lynx Charge electric street sweeper from Rasco, Croatia.