Cigarette butts pose a huge risk to the world’s oceans and can be a pain to clean up by hand especially on public spaces like beaches. A group of Italian scientists have built a quadruped robot that can identify litter and pick up the smaller bits with its leg mounted vacuums.
VERO, the vacuum equipped quadruped robot, is a four-legged device designed to look for and clean up litter on a variety of terrains. VERO was designed and built by a team of researchers from the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, according to USA Today.
The group published a paper back in April on VERO’s development and effectiveness in the Journal of Field Robotics. The research paper states that cigarette butts are a serious concern. Discarded butts release toxic chemicals and microplastics into the ocean as they break down. It’s also the “second most common undisposed waste worldwide, in terrains that are hard to reach for wheeled and tracked robots.”
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