DustBot.org — Autonomous Service Robots Knowledge Hub

Where Robotics Meets the Everyday

In December 2006, nine research institutions across Europe set out to answer a deceptively simple question: could autonomous robots handle municipal services — waste collection, street sweeping, air quality monitoring — without human operators?

The DustBot project (FP6-045299), coordinated by Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, spent three years building and testing two platforms: DustCart for on-demand waste collection and DustClean for autonomous street sweeping with integrated environmental sensing.

This site documents that project and the broader field it helped define. From differential GPS navigation and gas distribution mapping to the modern delivery robots that inherited its ideas, you will find technical deep-dives, original research summaries, and profiles of the machines that followed.

Featured

Read the full project history, explore the technical overview, or start with what service robots actually are.

From the Archive

The DustBot consortium produced over 40 peer-reviewed publications between 2007 and 2010, covering topics from ad-hoc mesh networking to human-robot interaction in public spaces. The research section collects the most significant findings.