Robot with vacuum cleaner feet to clean beaches of cigarette butts
Robot Vero has vacuum cleaner nozzles on its feet with which it can suck up cigarette butts. Other tools could also be attached to the feet.
The four-legged robot dog Vero sucks up cigarette butts on a beach.
(Image: IIT)
Roboticists from the Dynamic Legged Systems department at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have declared war on carelessly discarded cigarette butts. The researchers sent the four-legged robot Vero ((Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot) into the field, which carries a vacuum cleaner on its back and sucks up the cigarette butts with its feet. The robot locates the butts using camera-based AI object recognition.
Around 6 trillion cigarettes are consumed worldwide every year, 4.5 trillion of which end up discarded on the ground and release around 700 different toxic substances into the ecosystem, the IIT researchers calculate. However, changing people's behavior is difficult, which prompted the scientists to develop a robot that can suck up cigarette butts. The researchers opted for a four-legged robot as the basis, which can also be used on sandy beaches. Robots with wheels would get stuck there. The aim was to create an automated system that could autonomously remove cigarette butts from beaches, among other things.
The scientists used an AlienGo robot from Unitree as a basis, they write in their study "VERO: A vacuum-cleaner-equipped quadruped robot for efficient litter removal", published in the Journal of Field Robotics. The researchers strapped a standard vacuum cleaner to the quadruped's back. Suction nozzles on its four feet are connected to it via hoses. The roboticists designed the 3D-printed nozzles in such a way that they generate as much suction power as possible near the floor, but do not hinder the robot when walking or possibly cause it to stumble.
Coordinating the vacuum cleaner feet
During the project, it proved difficult to have the robot autonomously locate cigarette butts and then place the feet in such a way that the butts could be vacuumed up. First, an operator manually defines an area to be cleaned of cigarette butts. The robot then independently calculates a path to be able to walk through the area optimally. As it explores the area, it uses built-in cameras and a neural network to recognize the cigarette butts lying on the floor. It has to filter out duplicate butts as duplicates.
The correct positioning of the feet, on the other hand, is more difficult. They have to be placed close enough to the cigarette butts so that they can be sucked up by the nozzles without the robot losing its balance. An Intel RealSense depth camera on the robot's head helps to locate the cigarette butt more precisely and to calculate the exact foot position required from the images.
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The researchers tested Vero in field tests. It was able to pick up almost 90 percent of cigarette butts on different terrain. However, this is still a little slow, as the robot has to carry out all the calculations on board.
In principle, the researchers see further areas of application for their robot, such as the targeted spraying of weeds in fields, the inspection of cracks in buildings and the precise hammering of nails or rivets in construction projects. The researchers assume that the robot will also be able to carry different tools on its four feet to carry out several tasks at the same time. The control software is already designed for this.
(olb)