Development of Outdoor Service Robot to Collect Trash on Streets

Abstract

The outdoor service robot which we call OSR-01 is developed intending for cleaning up urban areas by means of collecting discarded trash such as PET bottles, cans, plastic bags and so on. We, in this paper, describe the architecture of OSR-01 consisting of hardwares such as sensors, a manipulator, driving wheels, etc. for searching for and picking up trash, and softwares such as fast pattern matching for identifying various trash and distance measurement for picking up via the manipulator. After describing the vision system in detail, which is one of the most critical parts of the trash collection task, we show the result of an open experiment in which OSR-01 collects PET bottles on a real shopping street in the special zone for robot research and development in Kitakyushu-city.