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We are in the year 2085 and our planet is covered in waste,
and humans now life in giant spaceships that always surround the planet,
and life on earth seems to have ceased.
Does this remind you of anything?
Yeah, Wall-E, the movie from Pixar.
And Wall-E is one of the last robots that collects garbage,
and his mission on earth is to gather waste and build mountains from it.
The future shown by Wall-E looks grim,
and changing the situation is not an easy task.
But there is a solution, and it is coming from Italy.
The DustBot project, coordinated by Professor Paolo Dario from the Sant’Anna School in Pisa,
in Italy, has developed two robots, DustClean and DustCart.
DustClean cleans, and disinfects the streets,
while the DustCart moves around the city, picking up the waste discreetly.
And they’re working already. They’re working in Osaka, Japan.
You want to know more about them? Ok, let’s have a look at it.
We are here at the Saint Anna's high school, in the secondary laboratories in Livorno.
Here we have our robot, Dustbot, which was developed
for the European plan of research and development, coordinated through Saint Anna's high school,
with the objective of improving the urban hygiene in the cities
through the use of robotics and information technologies.
Its objective is to improve urban hygiene through the collection of garbage from homes.
The user can directly call the robot from the house
and the robot comes to the house.
The citizen chooses the desired language,
it is registered and has a code,
which is inserted in this interface in the robot,
afterwhich the user selects the type of waste.
The compartment of the robot is opened and the user can place the trash bag into it,
afterwhich the robot, in a completely automatic fashion,
leaves the trash bags in an ecological area.
The other robot, like I was saying, is an automatic robot
that continually cleans the streets,
and were created for the zones
where the cumbersome tradition methods of trash collection do not have easy access,
for example areas of limited traffic access,
where the robots can move around and share the space with people.
They also have air sensors,
because they were also created to monitor the quality of the air,
so that we can also breathe better.
DustBot can also be used in certain ways as an information totem,
so that people can approach the robot,
and be given all different kinds of information,
for example the quality of air, depending on the situation,
or cultural information, for example if there are any exhibitions,
information about train schedules,
general information,
that would be interesting for a citizen.
The basic makeup of the robot that we use,
as you can see, is based on two wheels because we utilize the Segway dynamic
This was the initial technology that we chose to actualize,
because the Segway is able to overcome even small obstacles,
for example, getting up on sidewalks,
or climbing small stairs.
It is most useful for an urban environment,
where we don't have a structured environment,
but these environments are easily overcome with this robot.
As you can see, the robot has a head with eyes,
which displays the robot's state of mind by using LED lights.
When it is green, it signifies that everything is ok,
and that the user can interact with the robot,
but when the LED lights are red,
it means that the robot is processing information,
and therefore the user cannot interact with it.