Cigarette butts pose a huge risk to the world’s oceans and can be a pain to clean up by hand, especially in public places like beaches. A group of Italian scientists has developed a four-legged robot that can identify garbage and pick up small pieces with vacuum cleaners mounted on its legs.
VERO, a vacuum-powered quadruped robot, is a four-legged device designed to search for and clean debris in various areas. VERO was designed and built by a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Dynamic Legged Systems of the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. .
The group published a paper in April on the development and efficacy of VERO . A research paper states that cigarette butts are a serious concern. As the discarded tailings decompose, they release toxic chemicals and microplastics into the ocean. It is also “the second most common undiscarded waste in the world in areas hard to reach for wheeled and tracked robots.”
VERO is designed to collect this general type of small debris. The operator sets an area target for the robot to traverse. It then slowly travels the entire length of the target while identifying debris with a special neural network and on-board cameras. The quadruped robot has a “convolutional neural network for debris detection” that can target debris and pick it up with one of its four-legged vacuum cleaners. .
Beaches can also be difficult to clean because the sand makes it difficult to move wheelie bins or heavy containers over the area. The researchers conducted tests in “six different open-air” scenarios to demonstrate VERO’s ability to navigate difficult terrain. It can stop picking up trash with its chin-mounted Intel RealSense depth camera.
The robot didn’t pick up every piece of litter in the initial test, but it still picked up 90 percent of the cigarette butts identified in the test. This means 90 percent less waste thrown into the ocean.
There are currently no plans to implement VERO. VERO’s design could be programmed and engineered to perform other tasks, such as seeding crops, looking for infrastructure vulnerabilities and assisting with construction projects, the researchers say.
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