Watch: Vacuum-footed robot dog cleans up the beach

This nifty little quadruped robot has been trained to seek and eliminate litter by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, using a vacuum cleaner backpack with nozzles strapped to its ankles.

It's built on the AlienGo robo-dog from Chinese company Unitree – a relatively expensive and athletic research-grade robot, which we last encountered learning to open doors with the aid of a top-mounted manipulator arm. When we say expensive, we're talking around US$50,000 – but you may well be able to replicate this using a specced-up version of the highly impressive (and also surprisingly athletic) US$1,600 Unitree Go 2.

The VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot), is targeted at cigarette butts, one of the most common forms of litter. Using a pair of depth cameras and a convolutional neural network, it's able to spot butts on the ground, and plan its path such that it walks over them, switches the vacuum on, sucks them up and continues without stopping.

Check it out:

The idea of an all-terrain autonomous litter-busting robot is certainly a neat one, but as the video shows, VERO is a long way off moving as nimbly and quickly as Unitree's robots are capable of. In case you haven't seen them, here's the Go 2:

It'd certainly be awesome having a little fella like that hopping around the beach, stunting up and down stairs, sucking up butts with all four legs.

But on that note, it's hard to imagine how having four vacuum nozzles does a better job than two would – or heck, one, at this kind of speed. Not to mention, it's going to suck up a gutful of sand on the average beach, and lord knows what else besides.

So it's a ways off practical at this point, but still, a neat idea and one that'd be fun to see developed. And clearly, it doesn't have to be a vacuum on the end of those legs; it could just as well be some sort of gardening tool, or, as the researchers suggest, maybe a nail gun attachment for tacking down planks. That could certainly save a human a back-ache, provided anyone's willing to trust an autonomous robot dog with a nail gun.

The Italian VERO team's research is available in the Journal of Field Robotics.

Source: Dynamic Legged Systems Lab, via IEEE Spectrum