Meet VERO, a vacuum cleaner equipped robot, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify cigarette butts on the ground, and sucks them up with vacuum cleaner attachments on each foot.

VERO's developers hope it's the solution to one of the world's most pressing environmental problems - littering.

"I thought, why not place the feet in a good way so that while you're going, you're doing something useful? We can quite easily distinguish what are cigarette butts, for example, and that's just a start,” explains Claudio Semini, who is part of the design team at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.

"The VERO Robot is really born out of almost a frustration of seeing how people are just flicking away and just leaving their cigarette butts on the beach, in the small alleys," adds Semini.

"These are places where machines can't access, like the cleaning vehicles that can clean the roads very efficiently and the squares. In these little hard to access areas there must be a different way because if people need to pick them up by hand, one by one, this is obviously not a solution."

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VERO uses a camera system and an algorithm to recognize its targets and plan a route.

The team says it has successfully collected approximately 90 percent of cigarette butts in diverse environments. But Semini says it can also help in removing other objects and larger litter.

"Later on, it can be bottle caps or small pieces of plastic, whatever you can train the neural network to recognize can be sucked up,” he said.

VERO can also compile statistics on the quantity and type of litter in different areas. If it encounters larger objects like bottles or pizza cartons, it can mark their locations for collection by human teams or other robotic systems. 

This feature is particularly beneficial in places like Genoa's beaches, where larger debris often accumulates during the warmer months.

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