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Watch: Vacuum-footed robot dog cleans up the beach

This nifty little quadruped robot has been trained to seek and eliminate litter by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, using a vacuum cleaner backpack with nozzles strapped to its ankles.

It's built on the AlienGo robo-dog from Chinese company Unitree – a relatively expensive and athletic research-grade robot, which we last encountered learning to open doors with the aid of a top-mounted manipulator arm. Using a pair of depth cameras and a convolutional neural network, it's able to spot butts on the ground, and plan its path such that it walks over them, switches the vacuum on, sucks them up and continues without stopping. A graduate in Psychology, former business analyst and touring musician, he's covered just about everything for New Atlas, concentrating lately on clean energy, AI, humanoid robotics, next-gen aircraft, and the odd bit of music, motorcycles and automotive.

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