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Dustbot
	Dustbot Demo Pontedera.
Inception	2009
Website	http://www.dustbot.org/

Dustbot was a prototype robot that collected garbage from homes and streets.^[1] It could be summoned by phone call or SMS, and used GPS to automatically make its way to the customer, collect the rubbish, and take it to a dustbin. In addition, the Dustbots carried environmental sensors to monitor the pollution levels over, for example, a pedestrian area. Prototypes were tested in Italy, in Sweden, in Korea and Japan. Launch was planned in 2009, but the last reference in its webpage dates from 2011. The Dustbot project was funded by the European Commission and it never launched as a commercial product.^[2]

Technical

Dustbot uses different localisation and uses GPS navigation^[3] combined with pre-loaded maps.^[4] It uses a gyroscope to keep it upright, and has ultrasonic, infrared and laser sensors to avoid collisions with static and dynamic obstacles.^[3]

It is able to monitor pollution through a number of air quality sensors, ^[4]^[5] and can warn if the levels are too high.^[6] This is especially important in the case of gases that humans cannot sense or when long-term exposure to slightly increased concentrations needs to be verified.^[7] The distribution of gases is modelled using statistical methods.^[8]^[9]

Two DustCart robots were deployed in the village of Peccioli, Tuscany, from June 15, 2010, to August 7, 2010, providing "door to door separate waste collection on demand". The system was found to be easy to use, providing satisfactory service and increasing recycling. Its main weaknesses were "slow service/traffic problems (and) low bin capacity", and also the existence of "barriers to entry", according to a report by Nicola Canelli presented during ICT 2010 Conference Session, held in Bruxelles, September 27, 2010.^[10] As of November 10, 2017, the project seems to have been ended; still, the Dustbot homepage is online to this day, the last "news" update being apparently done in 2011. There is also a reference to the project in a presentation by Paolo Dario at the International Workshop on Autonomics and Legal Implications (Berlin, November 2, 2012).^[11]

References

^ "Tomy Dustbot: The original floor cleaning robot". TechCrunch. 22 January 2009. Archived from the original on 2022-02-14. Retrieved 2022-02-14.
^ "Dustbot - a robot designed to clean up our streets (w/video)". www.nanowerk.com. Archived from the original on 2022-02-14. Retrieved 2022-02-14.
^ ^a ^b Duncan Kennedy (29 May 2009). "Dustbot the street cleaning robot". BBC World News. Archived from the original on 16 October 2019. Retrieved 8 June 2009.
^ ^a ^b Emma Woollacott (29 May 2009). "Robot garbage cart set to hit Italian streets". TG Daily. Archived from the original on 2 June 2009. Retrieved 8 June 2009.
^ Gabriele Ferri; Alessio Mondini; Alessandro Manzi; Barbara Mazzolai; Cecilia Laschi; Virgilio Mattoli; Matteo Reggente; Todor Stoyanov; Achim J. Lilienthal; Marco Lettere; Paolo Dario (May 2010). "DustCart, a Mobile Robot for Urban Environments: Experiments of Pollution Monitoring and Mapping during Autonomous Navigation in Urban Scenarios". Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010) Workshop on Networked and Mobile Robot Olfaction in Natural, Dynamic Environments. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03.
^ David Jonasson (23 May 2009). "Robots to sweep the streets". Stockholm News. Archived from the original on 27 May 2009. Retrieved 8 June 2009.
^ Achim J. Lilienthal; Amy Loutfi; Tom Duckett (October 1, 2006). "Airborne Chemical Sensing with Mobile Robots". Archived from the original on April 13, 2009.
^ Achim J. Lilienthal; Tom Duckett (August 31, 2004). "Building Gas Concentration Gridmaps with a Mobile Robot". Archived from the original on April 11, 2009.
^ Cyrill Stachniss; Christian Plagemann; Achim J. Lilienthal (April 2009). "Learning Gas Distribution Models Using Sparse Gaussian Process Mixtures". Archived from the original on 2010-10-24.
^ "Shaping Europe's digital future | Shaping Europe's digital future". Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2014-06-02.
^ "Autonomous Systems and Robot Companions" (PDF). www.jura.uni-wuerzburg.de. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-02-14. Retrieved 2017-11-10.