AI-Powered Cleaning Robot: A Sustainable Approach to Waste Management

The world is producing a massive amount of single-use waste, especially plastic waste made from polymers. Such waste is usually distributed in large areas within cities, near roads, parks, forests, etc. It is a challenge to collect them efficiently. In this work, we propose a Cleaning Robot as an autonomous vehicle for waste collection, utilizing the Nvidia Jetson Nano platform for precise arm movements guided by computer vision capabilities. Integrated with the Raspberry Pi platform for mobility control, the robot employs the YOLO (You Only Look Once) framework for efficient waste detection and classification. The model was trained, implemented in the robot prototype, and tested on preprocessed waste images, resulting in mean average precision (mAP) above 80 percent. Our design emphasizes singular-object focus, enabling real-time detection of waste with accurate distance (83.7-95.6%) and direction (84.7-97.3 %) information. The robot autonomously navigates towards detected waste, halting at a predefined distance for collection and disposal into a designated bin. This work contributes to advancements in waste management systems using small robots.