Dustbot

Video-1 (Demonstration in Pontedera) > 40 000 vues
Video-2 (il robot spazzino come WALL-E) > 14 850 vues
Video-3 (Tg2) > 8 000 vues

The DustBot project is aimed at designing, developing, testing and demonstrating a system for improving the management of urban hygiene based on a network of autonomous and cooperating robots, embedded in an Ambient Intelligence infrastructure. The robots will be able to operate in partially unstructured environments (such as squares, streets, parks, etc.) and to vacuum-clean them from rubbish and dirt. They will be able to transport small quantities of home garbage, collected on demand from citizens, at their doors. By using preloaded information on the environment (e.g. area maps) and inputs from on-board and external sensory systems, and by taking advantage of the benefits provided by the Ambient Intelligence platform, the robots will be able to move with a proper (and selectable) level of autonomy to carry out their tasks. The robots will be also equipped with multiple sensors for the monitoring of atmospheric pollutants (e.g. nitrogen oxides –NOx-, sulphur oxides –SOx-, ozone -O3-, benzene, COx, etc.), giving information on the environmental quality in real time. Robots will work as mobile stations, which will monitor pollutants levels in highly populated areas (e.g. pedestrian, central areas). Acquired data will be also transferred onto dedicated databases by utilizing the features of the ubiquitous communications network. The robots and sensors will be part of an Ambient Intelligence platform, which will integrate not only sensors and tools for monitoring the environment and robot tasks execution, but also communications backhaul systems during clean up/emergency operations, databases technologies, knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) processes for extracting and increasing knowledge on urban hygiene management. Following the computation on stored data, feedback will be sent back to human actors (supervisors, decision makers, like municipality managers, etc.) and/or robotic operators, in order to perform actions. Web page of the project: www.dustbot.org

Publications

  • Alistair Doswald and Stephan Robert, « Better Than Nothing Mobile IPv4 Fast Handovers », draft-doswald-robert-mip4-better-than-nothing-fast-handover-00-2, March 2008, IETF.
  • Francesco Chiti et al., “Supporting Distributed Applications for Swarm of Robots within Smart Environments:  The Way of EU Project DustBot”, IWCMC 2009 Mobile Computing Symposium, June 21-24, 2009, Leipzig, Germany.

CollaborationEU Project