Optimized Operation Management With Predicted Filling Levels of the Litter Bins for a Fleet of Autonomous Urban Service Robots

Autonomous smart waste management services are becoming an essential component of sustainable urbanization. However, the lack of data and insights from current service-providers impedes a reliable transition from labor-intensive to autonomous services. Deploying information gathering devices makes services expensive and resource-demanding. In project MARBLE (Mobile Autonomous RoBot for Litter Emptying) we are currently investigating the implementation of a fleet of service robots. In this framework, we could show that the absence of filling data of litter bins (LBs) hinders the possibility of providing an energy-efficient and time-effective service. Hence, we introduce an approach where machine learning-based predictions for filling levels of LBs, derived from our extensive data gathering, are used to effectively manage the autonomous emptying process. The novel Simulated Rebalancing approach in route-planning combined with the Knapsack algorithm ensures efficient service in comparison to the Nearest Neighbor algorithm. A promising 82% filling level prediction accuracy was achieved with the XGBoost binary classifier, as compared to the 59% baseline accuracy. Through incorporating the predicted filling level data in the Simulated Rebalancing approach, a reduction of 26% in operational time and 31% in energy consumption was achieved for our simulated tests for service-event-area (SEA) James-Simon-Monbijoupark in Berlin with 49 LBs.