An autonomous waste-retrieval robot

GIGI

A legged robot that walks trails, beaches and race routes, finds the litter, and picks it up.

First fieldSan Francisco, 37.77° N

TerrainSand · Trail · Street

StatusSimulation, Go2 hardware next

The problem

Trash everywhere.

Cleanup crews and volunteers do it by hand, on terrain wheels cannot cross. The litter comes back every day.

The robot in a city street covered in bottles and cups after a marathon

Races

30,000

Gel wrappers and water cups left behind for every 1,500 athletes.

The robot on sand, leaving footprints, next to a can

Beach

Every tide

The ocean washes debris ashore again, so the cleanup never ends.

The robot with its arm raised in a rocky mountain valley

Mountains

Too steep

Litter piles up where it is too remote for cleanup crews or sherpas.

Festivals & nightlifeTons

every night

Cleanup eats a big share of every event budget.

The solution · MVP

Off the shelf. Out in the field.

A Unitree Go2 quadruped with an SO-101 arm on its head and a bin on its back. No custom hardware to build, a low cost per site, and each robot pays back fast.

Side view of the Go2 robot dog with a yellow SO-101 arm holding a red can and a grey bin on its back — Gigi MVP, simulation render. Arm raised, can in the jaws, litter in the bin.

Body: Unitree Go2 EDU quadruped
Arm: SO-101 with extended links, 5 joints and a gripper, bolted upright on a printed head plate
Pick stance: 0.14 mtrunk height. It crouches when an item is in reach
Bin: 170 × 98mm, grey tub with a liner, raised on posts above the hips
Vision: YOLO11 segmentation, trained on real photos and photoreal renders
Picks: 83 / 100in the pick-and-place benchmark
Field run: 4 / 4cans collected, 0 wrong items picked
Tools: Swappable: gripper, scoop, sand sieve, magnetic gripper for small or buried metal

Demo · Isaac Sim

Sand, then trail.

Left, the scene camera. Right, the robot's own camera with the model's outlines. Physics in MuJoCo, sand in Newton MPM, rendering in Isaac Sim.

47 s · sand beach, then forest trailRendered at 12.5 fps

Market landscape

Open ground.

Gigi works across three growing markets: environment, tourism and robotics.

autonomous litter robots deployed at scale in the USSource: no published fleet data

$1B

beach-cleaning robot marketSource: WiseGuy Reports

$17.5B

quadruped robot market in 2035Source: Precedence Research