Council Goes IoT for wealth management.
Brimbank City Council’s garbage trucks will take on a new role over the next six months to a year, automatically mapping damage to roads and other assets.
The trucks will carry GPS sensors and high-resolution depth video cameras and will use 5G to transmit images to an AWS-based system, where they can be documented and assigned to a maintenance team.
The pilot project is supported by a $1.18 million federal government grant as part of the Australian 5G Innovation Initiative. The program was created to help small and large companies test and develop 5G applications, services, and products.
The 5G Internet of Things (IoT) mobile solution for data-driven road maintenance at Project Brimbank is delivered in partnership with Swinburne University and Optus.
The project will automate asset health monitoring and auditing, reducing the time (up to a week) to identify and document all Brimbank roads and roads in need of maintenance, as well as provide real-time information to maintenance teams.
The 5G-based camera or laser technology will be installed on the council’s garbage trucks to collect data from Brimbank’s streets and sidewalks as the trucks drive through the board, providing waste disposal services.
The automated process will transform the current time-based maintenance approach to a reactive one – helping to accelerate data collection and asset maintenance and reduce asset audit costs by more than 50%.
Associate Professor Prem Prakash Jayaraman said the first application for the project will be to identify and report in real-time when someone has dropped a pile of hard waste without permission.
From there, the system expands to photograph other damaged objects, such as roads, signs, bus stops, and the like.
Managing these assets is currently very manual: someone takes a car, drives around, and makes a declaration.
Brimbank City Council hopes automating the process will halve the cost of asset testing.
“The Brimbank Council has welcomed the announcement by the federal government that Brimbank will receive funding to implement a high-tech automated 5G mobile solution to collect data on the condition of the council’s roads and footpaths,” said Mayor Jasmine Nguyen from Brimbank.
This innovative 5G-based project gives us a faster and more efficient way to identify which assets need maintenance and get the information to the work crews.
In addition to sending data to the undisclosed cloud service over Optus 5G connections, garbage trucks collect detailed data on network coverage and performance as they cover every street in the local government area, often at slow speeds.
Jayaraman said the network allows uploads up to 900 Mbps.
While garbage trucks today are equipped with video cameras, they don’t upload in real time – “Someone has to go get the video,” he said, which means a delay of up to 48 hours in getting information to the council committee. Systems and traded.
Brimbank Mayor, Councilor Jasmine Nguyen, said the project “will help the municipality respond more quickly to assets in need of maintenance.”
The city of Greater Bendigo previously used garbage trucks to test the signal quality of an IoT network it was set up.
Matthew Giannelis
Secondary editor and executive officer at Tech Business News. Matthew is passionate about sharing his knowledge of the technology industry. He is also an advocate for global cybersecurity issues. He has been working as an IT support engineer for 20 years. He has been working as an IT support engineer for 20 years.