Dustbot the street cleaning robot

garbage robot capacity: 1 garbage bag

therefore, at any given time, there should be 100's of robots roaming the streets, visiting various addresses (and then plopping the bags in convenient piles for the real garbage truck to retrieve)

homework for Italian hackers: create your own "robot parade" by war-dialing 100's of robot garbage pickup calls at carefully selected times and locations

It looks like the platform was designed around a Segway. Ultimately, while the execution and development of the hardware is excellent, I think the logistics of everyday life will be the ultimate downfall of the machine. How does it perform in various weather environments? Will it require a trip back to the drop off depot after every single bag? Just how many robots are required to handle the amount of garbage generated every day in just a few blocks of the city? How does it deal with human interference enroute to the pick up/drop off point?

Seems like there are a lot of questions to be answered before I'm convinced it is a reasonable solution.

The eyes on the thing remind me of the robots from Disney's "The Black Hole." (Those were probably given big, highly visible eyes in order to be more appealing.)

http://zomgablog.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/robot_vincent.j...

Even today the mafia is still deeply involved in garbage collection in Italy. How long before we get mafiabots?

P.S.

I couldn't resists the Futurama punchline, but please do not vote me up for it.

How do they deal with theft?

Aside from that and a bunch of other questions, I'm still really excited to see stuff like this. I can't wait till we have robots rolling all over the place.