Picture credit: Internet of Parks

The Internet of Parks (IoP), a system of automated robots designed to clean city municipalities, has won first prize at the latest TM Forum Hackathon.

The hackathon, the second in TM Forum’s history, ran under the theme of “smart citizens in a smart city”, bringing enterprise developers, designers and technologists together under one banner. It included sponsors such as Orange, IBM, Ericsson, FIWARE and Team Cote d’Azur.

IoP works in the French city of Nice, ranked as the fourth smartest city in the world according to a recent Juniper Research study. According to its ChallengePost description, its aim is to “directly [provide] the city clean and digitally connected public spaces” as well as to “promote a healthier Nice, relying on a public acceptance of the idea of automised and connected vehicles.”

The solution utilises APIs from three different sources; three from TM Forum for a product catalogue, ordering products and issuing warning tickets, as well as the Ericsson connected car API and IBM’s developer-friendly platform as a service Bluemix. A visit to the IoP’s Bluemix portal shows real-time updates including an information feed detecting whether rubbish bins are full and whether robots have broken down, among others.

Joann O’Brien, TM Forum vice president of agile collaboration, said in a statement: “Our sponsors and partners worked collaboratively to generate novel ideas that solve some of the biggest challenges for enabling smart cities, and we’re proud to see that the outcomes have the potential to promote cleaner, healthier cities the world over.”

Other winners in the hackathon included Food Language, an app that translates foreign language restaurant menus to flag up potential allergies, and ECO2, a connected car app which visually displays localised pollution data to drivers.

You can take a look at the Internet of Parks live feed here.