Imagine lying on the beach, lying in the sun, and suddenly you see a robot dog passing by with a vacuum cleaner on its back. No, this is not a parody of the famous episode of “Black Mirror”, but the reality of garbage collection of the future.
VERO is the latest creation of the Italian Institute of Technology, created thanks to the team of Claudio Semini. This is how a mechanical quadruped with built-in cameras and artificial intelligence appeared, which roams the beaches in search of garbage and cigarette butts.
Two cameras and a trained neural network are responsible for tracking cigarette butts. When it recognizes a cigarette butt, the robot dog puts its paw with a vacuum cleaner tube on it, sucks it up, then removes its paw and checks if the butt is gone. If so, it goes on to look for others. When the battery starts to run out, VERO runs to the base.
A backpack vacuum cleaner, which is placed on VERO’s back, is responsible for suction. All four paws can suck up cigarette butts.
The working prototype ends up costing around $50,000, but they promise that when it goes into production it will be an order of magnitude cheaper – several thousand dollars.
The idea behind VERO is fascinating. An autonomous robot that cleans beaches non-stop, without complaining about the heat or requiring ice cream breaks, is an excellent solution to keeping our coastlines clean and free of harmful waste.
