SMS calls garbage disposal robots.

In a small village in Tuscany will start in March, a field in which garbage collection and street cleaning robots take over. Instead of fixed times to come to the house empty bins as soon as the inhabitants of an SMS to send the city clean.

 

The Italian Peccioli town has about 5,000 inhabitants, winding streets and stately historic buildings. In view of the village which is about 50 miles southwest of Florence in Tuscany is, one thinks involuntarily of the attributes of a classic holiday Italy: elegant landscapes, ancient architecture and traditional food. It will soon Peccioli in an experiment carried out, which sounds like science fiction: robots refuse collection and street cleaning will take over.

Dustbot homepage: In Tuscany, in future, the robots take on dirty work

The practice test is a robot named DustClean the streets Pecciolis independently of waste clean up, while his colleague DustCart the trash pick up. The latter does not happen at fixed times, but according to the needs of residents. If the trash is full, they send an SMS to the headquarters of the rubbish collection send whereupon the sheet metal garbage man hopefully will set into motion.

DustCart and DustClean are variants of the robot
DustBot who in the past three years by researchers at the
University of Florence and the
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna was developed. The scientists collaborated with seven other institutions from five European countries. A large part of the around 2.8 million overall project budget comes from the European Union. The name of the Sauber-bot was developed by a Disney character-inspired, but also has direct ancestors: Under the name "DustBot" brought
The Japanese company Tomy in 1985 a series of vacuum cleaners and staubfegender robot on the market, but rather as a toy to understand.

The result of the previous development, the platform is DustBot that their orders depending on the application area is done in different ways. As the vehicle rolls DustCart upright like the Segway scooter. It looks like a dustbin on wheels, the only antenna and monitor their high-tech appearance receives. The DustClean variant, however, is tipped to four wheels, in-style vacuum cleaner to clean the streets. This orients them to role models, their practicality has already demonstrated, such as
the robot vacuum cleaner "Roomba".

From the living room on the road

Both garbage man robots find their way in principle with the GPS satellite navigation system. But the Sauber-bots would not be everyday, they would stubbornly on the routes to be calculated. Road to fitness by ultrasonic sensors receive those other road users and obstacles of all kinds, not in their digital maps are evasive.

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If the tests in Peccioli successful, this would be a crucial step in the direction of the often cited pervasive everyday robotics. "Whether behind the bar, at the airport or in the garbage disposal: Robots are used in 10 to 15 years belong to everyday life, like the washing machine, which 40 years ago has kept its withdrawal," said, for example,
Jens Hanke of the Berlin high-wrought Robowatch Technologies last year to blogs ONLINE.

And the researchers DustBot of the project are always looking for other areas of their platform. Thus, a variant DustBot soon in Osaka, Japan elderly carrying shopping bags to help, as project manager Paolo Dario opposite "
pressetext "said.