Detection and location of domestic waste for planning its collection using an autonomous robot

Abstract

This paper presents an approach of a detection and location system for waste recognition in outdoor environments that can be usable on an autonomous robot for garbage collection. It is composed of a camera and a LiDAR. For the detection task, some YOLO models were trained and tested for classification of waste by using a own dataset acquired from the camera. The image coordinates predicted by the best detector are used in order to compute the location relative to the camera. Then, we used the LiDAR to get a global waste location relative to the robot, transforming the coordinates of the center of each trash instance. Our detection approach was tested in outdoor environments obtaining a mAP@.5 around 0.99 and a mAP@.95 over 0.84, and an average time of detection less than 40 ms., being able to make it in real time. The location method was also tested in presence of objects at a maximum distance of 8 m., obtaining an average error smaller than 0.25 m.