A group of Italian scientists have developed a quadruped robot called VERO, equipped with leg-mounted vacuums, to clean up litter, specifically cigarette butts, in various terrains. This robot was created by researchers at the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and is designed to identify and pick up litter using a special neural network and onboard cameras. The researchers published a paper in April highlighting VERO’s effectiveness in removing cigarette butts, which are a major environmental concern due to the release of toxic chemicals and microplastics into the ocean. VERO, with its convolutional neural network for litter detection, was able to pick up 90 percent of the cigarette butts identified during testing. While there are no current plans to implement VERO, the researchers suggest that its design could potentially be used for other tasks such as crop spraying, infrastructure inspection, and construction projects.
