Helsingborg is Sweden’s eighth biggest municipality, located in the southern part of the country. The city has close to 150 000 inhabitants and like many cities of today, Helsingborg faces challenges due to rapid urbanization. As the city streets become busier, the problems of traffic congestion, emissions and crumbling infrastructure are exacerbated. Technological innovations within areas like mobility and city monitoring are crucial to face these challenges successfully. 

Meeting Univrses

The Helsingborg municipality is at the forefront when it comes to investing in smart city technology, not just in Sweden but globally. The collaboration with Univrses demonstrates the innovative drive within the city. In 2020, Univrses met with The City of Helsingborg to demonstrate 3DAI™ City, a system designed for gathering data in urban environments. It was confirmed that the system had great potential to be used for automatically tracking and monitoring the urban infrastructure in the city. A plan for further deployment and development was created.

Andréas Hall, Development Engineer at The City of Helsingborg, says: “We are very happy to be working with Univrses. Relevant urban data is an important key to make the city better. Our aim is to improve city operations and create urban environments that best serve the residents’ needs in Helsingborg, and we believe that Univrses’ technologies will help us achieve this. In the first step, we will use the data gathered from the 3DAI™ City to do an inventory of the city’s road signs.”

Deployment

The initial deployment of 3DAI™ City is on waste management vehicles provided by NSR (Nordvästra Skånes Renhållnings AB). Smartphones equipped with Univrses’ Computer Vision software are deployed on several vehicles that are operating on different routes in Helsingborg. 3DAI™ City gives them sensing capabilities. As they carry out their everyday services, they harvest the city for relevant, actionable and anonymized urban data. A constant stream of real-time data on features like road damage, traffic flows, road works and pedestrian density is accessed by the Helsingborg municipality. The NSR fleet covers every street in Helsingborg approximately every 2 weeks offering frequent updates. The urban data that is gathered will be presented to the municipality on the web-based dashboard, enabling the people in charge to improve decision-making.

H22 City Expo

Univrses will be a partner at the H22 City Expo, one of the largest Smart City conferences in the world, hosted by The City of Helsingborg in 2022. During the 35 day-long conference, a demonstration of the deployment of 3DAI™ City will enable visitors to see firsthand how the city is using this technology. The deployment will demonstrate the benefits of the platform, and show the huge potential of using Univrses’ Computer Vision technologies for city monitoring purposes.

Between May 30th and July 3, 2022, H22 City Expo will be an innovation arena for cities, businesses, academia, associations and residents. Visitors will experience cutting-edge technology, and enjoy many demonstrations of exciting innovations for the smart, sustainable cities of tomorrow.

Read more at https://h22.se/en/h22cityexpo/

Going forward

The collaboration between Helsingborg and Univrses is a textbook example of how cities and tech start-ups can work together. Skills and solutions provided by Univrses form one fundamental part of the project. Experience and vision provided by leaders at the Helsingborg municipality form the other. The combination of both will solve real-world problems in the city.

This is a pioneering initiative within Smart City development, not just in Sweden but in the whole world. Over the course of the collaboration, the potential of 3DAI™ City will be explored. The aspiration is to deploy the system across different fleets in the city offering timely and complete coverage. Throughout, Univrses will continue to develop features that will make Helsingborg a smarter, safer and more sustainable city.