A Robotic System for Automatic Identification and Collection of Recyclable Plastic Bottles

Plastics have become a cornerstone of modern life, but they are also hazardous for the environment. Manually collecting and sorting such recyclable plastic from a mix of other refuse is tedious work, and has accompanying health hazards. This work develops a prototype autonomous robot that can navigate via a combination of GPS and image based techniques to reach known locations where recyclable trash is expected, then identify and collect plastic bottles from among other waste. For a first prototype, the focus is on recognition and picking up of a particular type of plastic bottle commonly used for packaging drinking water.