Addressing the challenge of roadside litter in the United States, which has traditionally relied on costly and ineffective manual cleanup methods, this paper presents an autonomous multi-robot system for highway litter monitoring and collection. Our solution integrates an aerial vehicle to scan and gather data across highway stretches with a terrestrial robot equipped with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for litter detection and mapping. Upon detecting litter, the ground robot navigates to each pinpointed location, re-assesses the vicinity, and employs a "greedy pickup" approach to address potential mapping inaccuracies or litter misplacements. Through simulation studies and real-world robotic trials, this work highlights the potential of our proposed system for highway cleanliness and management in the context of Robotics, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence
@article{arxiv.2301.01704,
title = {TRASH: Tandem Rover and Aerial Scrap Harvester},
author = {Lee Milburn and John Chiaramonte and Jack Fenton and Taskin Padir},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.01704},
year = {2023}
}