Cigarette butts are the second most common undisposed-of litter on earth. Of the 6 trillion cigarettes inhaled every year, it’s estimated that over 4 trillion of the butts are just tossed onto the ground, each one leeching over 700 different toxic chemicals into the environment. Preventing those cigarette butts from winding up on the ground in the first place would be the best option, but it would require a pretty big shift in human behavior. Operating under the assumption that humans changing their behavior is a nonstarter, roboticists from the Dynamic Legged Systems unit at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, have instead designed a novel platform for cigarette-butt cleanup in the form of a quadrupedal robot with vacuums attached to its feet. The robot, called VERO, has a commercial vacuum mounted on its back. Hoses go from the vacuum down the leg to each foot, with a custom 3D-printed nozzle that puts as much suction near the ground as possible without tripping the robot. After calculating an exploration path, the robot uses its onboard cameras and a neural network to detect cigarette butts. This is trickier than it sounds, because there may be a lot of cigarette butts on the ground, and they all probably look pretty much the same, so the system has to filter out all of the potential duplicates. Since this whole process can take place on sand or stairs or other uneven surfaces, VERO has to prioritize not falling over before it decides how to do the collection. The final collecting maneuver is fine-tuned using an extra Intel RealSense depth camera mounted on the robot’s chin. Initial testing with the robot in a variety of different environments showed that it could successfully collect just under 90% of cigarette butts. This is about a lot more than cigarette butts, and the researchers suggest a variety of other potential use cases, including spraying weeds in crop fields, inspecting cracks in infrastructure, and placing nails and rivets during construction.
