Lidbot
TEXT SEBASTIAN HEUSSER AND ALEX LEHNERT
Our vision is to create an ecosystem in which waste management is transparent and autonomous. Our goal is to create a future in which businesses work together to keep cities clean and to build infrastructures that can map the entire lifecycle of a garbage bag and track it until it reaches the dump. But every beginning is hard, and first we need to find our place in this gigantic ecosystem. Lidbot is a level sensor that notifies teams when the garbage and recycling bins are full. Lidbot also collects important smart data on our garbage and recycling. Lidbot is meant to help both companies and cities to track their garbage and recycling systems properly by collecting intelligent sensor data. Lidbot also uses the IOTA DLT, the Tangle, to give a new home to data on garbage and recycling. A home that is safe and unchanging.
The Team Behind Lidbot
Ham Karami is the CEO and founder of Lidbot. Since his school years, Ham has been fighting for the environment and working on various projects that have contributed to making the world a better place. Andrzej Miller takes care of developing the Lidbot analysis platform. This is where distributed ledger, artificial intelligence and a user-friendly design meet. The design of the contents and the sensor is Lead Designer Alex‘s area of responsibility. The team is complemented with a three-person design and web team as well as a three-person hardware team, the so-called “Hardware-Engineer Magicians“. The team is organized decentrally and spread all over the world. However, the majority comes from Taiwan and Germany.
Lidbot in Detail
We just know far too little about our waste. Who produces how much, who collects it, and what really happens with it? In Germany, the whole system may be rather well-structured. We put our full waste bin out on the street, and companies take care of it. In other countries, this is unfortunately not the case. Garbage is simply thrown into rivers or woods. The consequences such as heavy pollution are hardly ever made a subject of discussion. With time, companies have learned that there is a lot of money in recycling. Meanwhile, this has assumed such alarming proportions that garbage is traded illegally. With Lidbot, we would like to make all of this much more transparent but also optimize it with the help of technology and innovation, in order to make the environment cleaner and, above all, keep it clean.
Our fist product will be a sensor that measures the filling level of garbage bins. We envision a living system that issues notifications autonomously whenever a garbage bin needs emptying. Like this, employees of cities or big department stores only need to pass by the full bins and can avoid detours past empty ones. This saves a lot of time and money which in turn can be invested in something else. The sensor has been built in a way that it can be incorporated into existing infrastructures easily. The system works without any additional technologies. Just attach the sensor inside the waste bin, register on the platform, and voilà – the sensor delivers the data. Plug and play via the mobile network in 146 countries.
Why Lidbot? – Our Vision
We would like to help building intelligent and clean cities. We are excited to be working on a project that will have a substantial impact on our planet. We can help cities and companies to save money while exerting a positive influence on the environment. With the Internet of Things and the growing digitization, we will increasingly see self-driving cars and robots in our daily lives in the future. We are building the foundation for these smart systems to know where the next waste bin is. Like this, autonomous garbage trucks can drive around the city and empty the full waste bins on their own.
Current Status
After putting many working hours into this project, we have now implemented a functioning, updated version of Lidbot. We are currently negotiating mass production of the sensor‘s casing. Furthermore, licensing procedures for our hardware are costing us the odd hour and lots of money. Many countries require hardware to go through a national certification process. We are currently trying to cover the associated costs, so Lidbot can come onto the market soon. We hope to be able to provide our clients with sensors by the beginning of 2020.
Ham Karami CEO and Founder
Twitter @lidbot_
Email ham@twoiot.com
Website https://lidbot.com