Autonomous robotic street sweeping: Initial attempt for curbside sweeping

Abstract

Autonomous street sweeping is an interesting robotic application because such street cleaning requires tedious and exhaustive human efforts of manual sweeping with brooms, blowing tools, or driving sweeping vehicles within a large area or along a long extension of roads on a regular basis. Toward autonomous street cleaning, we present our recent development of an autonomous robotic street sweeper. The developed system is aimed at autonomous cleaning with low cost hardware. In this work, a commercialized manual brush sweeper is robotized and equipped with two fish-eye cameras for environmental sensing. As an initial attempt of autonomous street sweeping, we show the cleaning performance of the robot along the curbside based on curbside recognition and tracking with top-view images.