Development and Testing of Garbage Detection for Autonomous Robots in Outdoor Environments

In Japan, there is a growing concern about labor shortages due to the declining birthrate and aging population, and there are high expectations for robots to help solve such social problems and create industries. However, due to the prohibition of public road tests in Japan, there are few examples of actual applications of robots. Therefore, considerations and problems in the practical application of robots are still unclear. In this paper, by focusing on the implementation of garbage collection technology, we have developed an autonomous garbage collection robot using deep learning. In addition, we have verified the usefulness of our garbage detection technology in outdoor environments by conducting actual demonstrations at HANEDA INNOVATION CITY, which is a large-scale commercial and business complex belonged private property, Utsunomiya University, and Nakanoshima Challenge 2019, which is a field of demonstration experiment in the outdoor environment. Our garbage detector was designed to detect cans, plastic bottles, and lunch boxes automatically. Through experiments on test data and outdoor experiments in the real-world, we have confirmed that our detector has a 95.6% Precision and 96.8% Recall. Conparisons to other state-of-the-art detectors are also presented.