Intelligent Route Planning for Autonomous Service Robots using Communicating Smart Dustbins

Efficient waste management is a defining feature of a future smart city and one of the core challenges to reduce the environmental impact of its inhabitants. Given the growing amount of waste that is discarded into public dustbins and the labour required for their maintenance, autonomous robots to empty the bins could help in mitigating those challenges. For this task, the mobile robotics platform MURMEL (Mobiler Urbaner Roboter zur Mülleimer EntLeerung) has been designed. However, the acceptance of this solution by the municipality and the public highly depends on the efficiency of task performance and the environmental impact of the system. To achieve that, we propose a communication framework involving smart dustbins, which inform a central planning entity about the filling level. A novel route planning algorithm is proposed based on the filling level communicated over LoRaWAN. It can avoid unavailing rides, where the robots cannot empty the dustbins due to its capacity limits and assembles a route to exploit the full capacity. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using a realistic simulation of 52 dustbins in an urban park, resulting in 13% less energy consumption, 29% less round-trips and a 42% increase in capacity utilization compared to a baseline route planning without communication.