Autonomous Robot for Garbage Detection and Collection

Abstract

This project develops an autonomous garbage detecting and collecting robot for cleaning in indoor spaces. Although other projects similar to this one has already been done, those have different limitations. Our robot uses a camera to continuously scan the room for objects/ garbage. It uses image processing to detect objects even if these are not geometrically shaped. The detection is also invariant to the object’s color. Once an object has been detected, the robot moves to the object’s location and picks up the object in its bin. Then the robot moves back to its starting position and resumes scanning the room for garbage. In order to implement image processing on a robot, we needed a powerful processor, so we used ‘Raspberry Pi’ – a credit card sized computer, to build our system. We also used sophisticated image processing software/ operations to detect the object. Since the computer runs in Linux operating system, we used ‘python’ programming language to develop our program.