Robotics

Watch: Vacuum-footed robot dog cleans up the beach

The VERO vacuum robot hunts for cigarette butts on a pebbled beach
Dynamic Limbed Systems Lab, Italian Institute of Technology
The VERO vacuum robot hunts for cigarette butts on a pebbled beach
Dynamic Limbed Systems Lab, Italian Institute of Technology

This nifty little quadruped robot has been trained to seek and eliminate litter by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, using a vacuum cleaner backpack with nozzles strapped to its ankles.

It's built on the AlienGo robo-dog from Chinese company Unitree – a relatively expensive and athletic research-grade robot, which we last encountered learning to open doors with the aid of a top-mounted manipulator arm. When we say expensive, we're talking around US$50,000 – but you may well be able to replicate this using a specced-up version of the highly impressive (and also surprisingly athletic) US$1,600 Unitree Go 2.

The VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot), is targeted at cigarette butts, one of the most common forms of litter. Using a pair of depth cameras and a convolutional neural network, it's able to spot butts on the ground, and plan its path such that it walks over them, switches the vacuum on, sucks them up and continues without stopping. Check it out:

The idea of an all-terrain autonomous litter-busting robot is certainly a neat one, but as the video shows, VERO is a long way off moving as nimbly and quickly as Unitree's robots are capable of. In case you haven't seen them, here's the Go 2:

It'd certainly be awesome having a little fella like that hopping around the beach, stunting up and down stairs, sucking up butts with all four legs.

But on that note, it's hard to imagine how having four vacuum nozzles does a better job than two would – or heck, one, at this kind of speed. Not to mention, it's going to suck up a gutful of sand on the average beach, and lord knows what else besides.

So it's a ways off practical at this point, but still, a neat idea and one that'd be fun to see developed. And clearly, it doesn't have to be a vacuum on the end of those legs; it could just as well be some sort of gardening tool, or, as the researchers suggest, maybe a nail gun attachment for tacking down planks. That could certainly save a human a back-ache, provided anyone's willing to trust an autonomous robot dog with a nail gun.

The Italian VERO team's research is available in the Journal of Field Robotics.

Source: Dynamic Legged Systems Lab, via IEEE Spectrum

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6 comments
CD
Displacyber beast!
paul314
If they've calibrated the vacuum properly, it's not going to suck up much sand if any. Cigarette butts and lots of other trash are way less dense than sand, so it takes less airflow to move them. Also finer, so you could likely set up a filter/container that would send the sand back out.

Next: track the people dropping the trash and make them pick up their own litter.
WireTalents
Paul, one of these robodogs has a flame thrower attached to it. That would stop repeat litterers :-)
But seriously, this machine wouldn't need a traditional vacuum filter, just a 3mm grid that would allow sand to be blown straight out again. When the vac motor turn off, the rubbish would fall into a lower bin, keeping the filter clean all the time.
Daishi
This thing is silly.
Global
By my calculation of butts tossed works out to be over 142,694,tossed every second!! every minute, every hour, every day, all year long. You would need 570,776 of these to just keep up, based on 15 butts a minute ambling speed, running around the clock.

Over 28.5 billion dollars to maintain the filth with this concept....by the 1.3 billion who smoke over 5 trillion dollars worth yearly!

Toss the percent of population that does this then we can start reversing many other issues.
ljaques
That thing is about as coordinated and quick as a one year old. It could pick up all the butts on 1 block of beach in a week, IF they were all dropped the day before it started. The development cycle has a very long way to go. Why not have a beach rake on the back and arms to vacuum it clean after 1-3 meters. It would be better with a tracked bot rather than quadruped.