Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management

TL;DR

This paper proposes a bio-inspired swarm robotics system for urban waste management, demonstrating through simulations that it outperforms current methods in efficiency and autonomy in realistic city scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel swarm robotics approach using multi-place foraging and stigmergy for urban waste collection, validated with real GIS data and diverse scenarios.

Findings

System outperforms existing waste management methods

Swarm approach improves efficiency and autonomy

Provides design insights for future swarm systems

Abstract

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to become one of the main driving factors for innovation in the field of robotics. The research presented in this paper explores the feasibility of a swarm robotics system in an urban environment. By using bio-inspired foraging methods such as multi-place foraging and stigmergy-based navigation, a swarm of robots is able to improve the efficiency and autonomy of the urban waste management system in a realistic scenario. To achieve this, a diverse set of simulation experiments was conducted using real-world GIS data and implementing different garbage collection scenarios driven by robot swarms. Results presented in this research show that the proposed system outperforms current approaches. Moreover, results not only show the efficiency of our solution, but also give insights about how to design and customize these systems.