This handy little four-legged robot has been trained to find and remove trash by scientists at the Italian Institute of Technology using a vacuum cleaner backpack with nozzles attached to its ankles.
It’s based on Chinese company Unitree’s AlienGo robo-dog — a fairly expensive and athletic research-grade robot that was last seen learning to open doors using a top-mounted manipulative arm. When we say expensive, we’re talking around $50,000 – but you can easily replicate that with a special edition of the highly impressive (and also surprisingly athletic) Unitree Go 2 for $1,600.
The VERO robot (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot) is focused on cigarette butts, one of the most common forms of garbage. Using a pair of depth cameras and a convolutional neural network, it can detect butts on the ground and plan its route by walking over them, turning on the vacuum, sucking them up, and continuing without stopping. Check it out:
VERO: a four-legged robot equipped with a vacuum cleaner for efficient garbage removal
The idea of an all-terrain autonomous trash-disposal robot is certainly neat, but as the video shows, VERO is far from moving as nimbly and quickly as Unitree’s robots are capable of. If you haven’t seen them yet, here’s Go 2:
Introducing Unitree Go2 – Quadruped Robot of Embodied AI starting at $1600
It sure would be awesome to have a little guy like that bouncing around the beach, scuttling up and down the stairs, sucking ass with all four legs.
But in that context, it’s hard to imagine having four vacuum jets doing a better job than two—or hell, one, at that speed. Not to mention that on the average beach it soaks up the guts of the sand and lord knows what else besides.
So it’s impractical at this point, but still a great idea that would be fun to see developed. And sure, it doesn’t have to be a vacuum at the end of those legs; it could just as well have been some kind of gardening tool, or, the researchers suggest, perhaps a nail gun attachment for attaching planks. That could certainly save a person a backache, provided one was willing to trust an autonomous robot dog with a staple gun.
Research by the Italian VERO team is available in Journal of Field Robotics.
Source: Dynamic Legged Systems Lab, via IEEE Spectrum