Vacuum-equipped robot dog cleans the beach
A four-legged robot equipped with a vacuum cleaner is being experimented with in Italy to clean up cigarette butts littering beaches.
VERO: A vacuum‐cleaner‐equipped quadruped robot for efficient litter removal - Amatucci - Journal of Field Robotics - Wiley Online Library
Robot Dog Vacuums Up Cigarette Butts From Italian Beaches - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robot-dog-vacuum
The robot developed by a team from the Italian Institute of Technology is called VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped Robot). It has vacuum nozzles attached to its four walking legs, and the vacuum cleaner itself is mounted on its back. In the video below, you can see it picking up cigarette butts from the side of the road, stepping firmly on the ground with each step.
VERO: a Vacuum-cleaner-Equipped Quadruped RObot for Efficient Litter Removal - YouTube
Once assigned an area to clean by a human operator, VERO can plan its own route and use cameras and neural networks to detect and clean up cigarette butts.
'Similar cleaning robots have existed in the past, but most of them were wheeled systems, which made them useless in places with unstable footing, like beaches. When the VERO development team tested it in various environments, it was able to pick up about 90% of the cigarette butts that had fallen in the designated area,' the company said.
'This is the first time that a walking robot's legs have been used simultaneously for locomotion and other tasks,' said Lorenzo Amatucci, one of the team's members. 'This sets it apart from robots that, for example, use their legs to open doors.'
VERO is based on the quadruped robot ' Aliengo ' developed by China's Unitree. Unitree is a company known worldwide for developing quadrupedal and humanoid robots, and in the past the US Marine Corps has experimented with new weapons by equipping Unitree robots with rocket launchers.
US Marine Corps tests 'robot dog equipped with rocket launcher' - GIGAZINE
Related Posts:
