This robotic dog can find and suck up garbage with its paws

Cigarette butts pose a serious threat to the world's oceans and it can be a pain to clean them by hand, especially in public areas such as beaches. A team of Italian scientists has developed a quadruped robot that can detect trash and pick up small pieces with leg vacuums.

VERO, a vacuum-equipped quadruped robot, is a four-legged device designed to inspect and clean waste in various locations. VERO was designed and built by a team of researchers from the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, according to .

The team published a paper back in April about the development and operation of VERO in . The research paper says that cigarette smoking is a major problem. Discarded butts release toxic chemicals and microplastics into the ocean as they decompose. It is also “the second most common non-disposable waste worldwide, in areas that are hard to reach for wheeled and tracked robots.”

VERO is designed to pick up this common type of small waste. The user sets the target field for the robot to traverse. It then slowly moves along the entire length of the target while identifying debris with a special neural network and internal cameras. The quadruped robot has a “convolutional neural network for garbage detection” that can identify garbage and pick it up with one of the vacuums mounted on its four legs, according to .

Cleaning the beaches can also be a challenge because the sand makes it difficult to carry wheelie bins or heavy containers around the area. The researchers conducted tests in “six different outdoor conditions” to demonstrate VERO's ability to navigate in difficult terrain. It can stabilize itself while picking up trash with the Intel RealSense depth camera mounted on its chin.

The robot didn't find every piece of trash in its first test but still picked up 90 percent of the cigarette butts identified in the test. That means 90 percent less waste ends up in the ocean.

There don't seem to be any plans to use VERO yet. The researchers say the VERO design can be programmed and developed to perform other tasks such as spraying crops, checking infrastructure and assisting in construction projects.

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