The Madrid City Council has launched an innovative project that promises to revolutionize waste management on the city’s streets. This involves the incorporation of inspection vehicles equipped with cameras and artificial intelligence, whose main objective is to detect poorly located waste around garbage containers.
This project, presented by the delegate of Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility, Borja Carabante, from the María Odiaga cleaning park, in Carabanchel, is part of the City Council’s continuous effort to improve street cleaning and reduce problem resolution times. incidents.
According to what was announced by Carabante, the initiative will be launched in an initial phase in the districts of Usera, Carabanchel and Villaverde, where an urgent need is evident with a daily average of 2,100 interventions to collect abandoned waste.
In this first stage, three inspection vehicles, developed by FCC Medio Ambiente, will be deployed in these areas in order to carry out visual recognition work assisted by artificial intelligence. This approach is expected to more effectively identify waste found outside containers, overcoming the limitations of conventional methods.
These vehicles, equipped with cameras capable of analyzing the environment and the objects they capture during their journey, will carry out a proactive and automatic inspection of the streets, allowing for faster and more precise detection of incidents. Furthermore, thanks to the use of algorithms based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is expected to achieve an accuracy of 85% in the detection of different types of waste.
One of the main advantages of this system is the significant reduction in incident resolution time. While previously the inspection tour could take up to five hours, with the new vehicles this time is reduced to approximately two hours. This not only allows for faster action on the ground, but also makes it possible to cover a greater extent of the road network.
The resolution of incidents is carried out instantly through a system that sends data to the cleaning services monitoring center in real time. This speed in problem management facilitates the rapid allocation of the resources necessary for their solution, which results in a notable optimization of the service’s effectiveness.
After a successful pilot phase in the aforementioned districts, the City Council plans to study the possibility of expanding the project to the 21 districts of Madrid, depending on the results obtained. With this initiative, Madrid is at the forefront of urban waste management, using technology to improve the quality of life of its citizens and the environmental sustainability of the city.
