Office waste cleanup: an application for service robots

Abstract

Waste cleanup is a task which occurs in a great variety of domains and contexts. In spite of the variety of the causes and the types of waste, cleaning it up typically involves dirty, dull, strenuous and sometimes hazardous actions. Thus waste cleanup constitutes a natural task for service robots. In this paper, we describe an office robot, DAVID, who in addition to collecting and delivering mail and stationary, cleans up offices from garbage. We describe, the system's flexible functional architecture and its various components. We identify some functionalities critical in waste-cleanup tasks and describe how they are accomplished in DAVID. The paper closes with the discussion of an experiment which demonstrates the performance of the system, and with a set of conclusions we drew from this work.