Vietnam is calling for development of a home-grown fleet of 40 self-driving robots to sweep its city streets, the first project put out for tender by the national science fund Nafosted under a program to build strategic technologies.

In a statement on Tuesday, the ministry-run Nafosted said each robot is to navigate on its own at up to 10 kilometers an hour, vacuum and cut PM2.5 and PM10 fine dust, and clean at least 1,000 square metres an hour.

The machines must hold at least 60 liters of waste and 60 liters of water, run for at least six hours on a charge, sweep a path of at least 1.2 meters and track the kerb to within 10 centimeters, with external sensors and electronics sealed to the IP67 dust- and water-resistance standard and both onboard and remote emergency stops.

At the core is an outdoor self-driving platform built to locate the robot, detect and follow kerbs, sense its surroundings, plan routes and drive at low speed, with an automatic safe-stop and geofencing to limit the area each robot may work in.

Three to five docking hubs are to recharge batteries quickly, manage them remotely and refill water and empty waste automatically, connecting to the robots at least 95 percent of the time.

Before any code runs on a real robot, developers must prove it in a digital simulation of at least 100 scenarios, able to inject faults into sensors, controllers, actuators, and communication links.

The government wants the system engineered and built domestically, such as the localization rate at 55 percent at the minimum.

The task is proposed by Phenikaa-X, a Vietnamese autonomous-driving firm affiliated with Hanoi-based private Phenikaa University.

Nafosted is taking budget proposals and applications on September 3-14.

Vietnam’s conglomerate Vingroup launches humanoid robots on global stage