Trash Detection Algorithm Suitable for Mobile Robots Using Improved YOLO

The illegal dumping of aluminum and plastic into cities and marine areas leads to negative impacts on the ecosystem and contributes to increased environmental pollution. Although volunteer trash pickup activities have increased in recent years, they require significant effort, time, and money. Therefore, we propose automated trash pickup robot, which incorporates autonomous movement and trash pickup arms. Although these functions have been actively developed, relatively little research has focused on trash detection. As such, we have developed a trash detection function by using deep learning models to improve the accuracy. First, we created a new trash dataset that classifies four types of trash with high illegal dumping volumes (cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, and cigarette butts). Next, we developed a new you only look once (YOLO)-based model with low parameters and computations. We trained the model on a created dataset and a dataset consisting of marine trash created during previous research. In consequence, the proposed models achieve the same detection accuracy as the existing models on both datasets, with fewer parameters and computations. Furthermore, the proposed models accelerate the edge device’s frame rate.