PICK IT UP.
LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE.
An uncrewed multirotor built to find litter, take only litter, and prove it did.
Search · Gate · Approach · Grasp · Verify · Stow
A municipal-services multirotor that runs a closed autonomous loop over streets and parks — identify, approach, verify, stow, discharge, depart — built around a default-decline gate that would rather leave litter behind than touch a bench, a sign, a memorial or an animal. A work machine for public space, not a weapon.
An uncrewed multirotor built to find litter, take only litter, and prove it did.
Search · Gate · Approach · Grasp · Verify · Stow
The Litter Collector is an uncrewed multirotor that runs a closed autonomous loop over municipal streets, parks and public spaces: identify litter, approach it, attempt collection, verify the item is actually in the hopper, and repeat until the hopper is full — then return to a Self-Charging Dock to discharge, recharge, take updated tasking and depart again.
It sits in the CS-6xx Movers block alongside the Cargo Mover, Personnel Mover and Heavy-Lift Logger — grouped there because, like them, it flies and functions as a mass carrier, moving material into the hopper the way its siblings move freight or people. It shares the Industrial line's civil doctrine in full: radio and GNSS permitted, sovereign Canadian manufacturing behind it, a work machine bought to do a job, not a weapon.
What sets it apart on this line is the problem it accepts. A sprayer or seeder works against a bounded target class over a consistent background. Litter has no finite class: arbitrary shape, color, material and state of decay, scattered through cluttered urban scenes that are also full of things that must never be touched — a bench, a sign, a memorial, someone's dropped property, a resting animal. A miss costs nothing; a wrong take costs the public's trust. So the design leans conservative everywhere it can: a default-decline gate, a verified grasp before any item counts as collected, and a machine built to fail toward inaction.
The engineering honesty runs both directions: the perception and grasp problem here is harder than its Industrial-line siblings, and the design does not pretend otherwise. The end-effector stays an open trade rather than a rushed pick, and the gate is built to say no by default — because on a public street, refusing to act is always the safe failure.
A mast-mounted EO-plus-depth sensor scans the beat as the aircraft holds a low-altitude search pattern. Detections split into two streams before anything else happens: litter candidates, and the do-not-take set — benches, signage, personal property, memorials, anything animal or in motion. Only a candidate that clears the gate gets an approach.
The end-effector then makes the pickup attempt. Which mechanism does that job is a live trade rather than a settled part: a vacuum head, a compliant gripper, a spike, and a sweep-and-scoop are the candidates on the table today, each suited to a different litter class, and no winner has been declared. Whichever one flies, the same rule governs it — a mass-delta or throat sensor confirms the item actually left the ground and entered the hopper before the machine logs a success, because an effector can report a clean grasp while holding nothing at all.
A refused or failed attempt is logged, not forced. The machine does not escalate grip force chasing a catch, and any motion or animal-class detection aborts the approach outright. The governing figure of merit is not speed — it is the gate's discipline: refusing correctly, every time, on a scene that is never the same scene twice.
Figures below are drawn from the Litter Collector engineering drawing package (CSH-DWG-LITTER-001). This platform's package is unusually candid that most performance figures are not yet modelled — values shown as open trades are study points, not commitments, and are stated that way on purpose.
Items-per-hour, hopper capacity and endurance are governed by variables the test program exists to close, and a number stated without them attached would be a guess dressed as a spec. What we will state is the shape of the answer: the bounded-target-class decision — which litter classes the product actually takes first — is the viability hinge everything else is measured against.
Canadian Shield's thesis is that manufacturing is the decisive capability, and that a civil work fleet should share tooling, avionics doctrine and safety chain with the defence fleet rather than reinvent them per product. The Litter Collector carries that thesis into the hardest civil-line case: public space, with people, animals and property sharing the scene.
The overlap is physical, not rhetorical. Its dual-battery power architecture, dual flight controllers, 2-of-3 GNSS vote and dual radio links are fleet property, inherited whole from the same doctrine that governs the Cargo Mover and Personnel Mover beside it in the CS-6xx Movers block. Its whole-airframe parachute and SIG AT polyfoam are standard fit, the same safety chain the rest of the estate carries — engineered here for a low-altitude, occupied-space profile rather than the open ground its siblings usually work.
And up here, the estate's radio boundary runs the civil way. The no-radio rule governs the defence, underground and tethered platforms without exception — but the Industrial line is the surface civil exception where radio and GNSS are permitted, and the Litter Collector uses both openly: conventional radio for command and telemetry, GNSS for beat navigation and for the tasking record that keeps a person in the loop on every change. A city park is not a jammed battlefield, and we do not build for it like one.
The CS-6xx Movers block carries the Cargo Mover (CS-600) and Personnel Mover (CS-610) freight and crew, the Heavy-Lift Logger (CS-620) beyond the freight ladder's ceiling, and the Litter Collector working the smallest, most public payload of the four — a single item at a time, verified before it counts. Every one of them turns around at the same Self-Charging Dock (CS-700) doctrine.
A Litter Collector shift is a loop, not a flight: a municipal tasking beat compiles at the dock, the machine works it item by item, and what comes home is a verified log — not a guess at how tidy the park looks. Here is the shift, end to end.
The machine departs the Self-Charging Dock already carrying its beat: the streets, pathways or park strips the municipal operator tasked at the last turnaround, with the do-not-take set — known fixtures, sensitive sites — flagged before the first metre of search. A person ratifies any change before the machine departs.
The machine works the beat low and slow, cycling the six-beat loop on every candidate: search, gate, approach, grasp, verify, stow. Anything ambiguous, anything in the do-not-take set, or anything that moves gets a refusal, not a forced attempt — and the refusal is logged as carefully as a collection.
On hopper limit or beat end, the machine returns to the Self-Charging Dock, discharges through the hopper's bottom door, recharges, and picks up refreshed tasking — hot spots the municipal operator flags, beats reordered by need — before departing again. Nothing is collected without a verified record attached to it.
Scenario illustrates the design intent of the operating loop. Grasp success across real litter classes, hopper capacity and duty-cycle are exactly what the bench and field test program exists to measure — and the bounded-target-class decision, not the machine shop, sets where that program starts.
The Litter Collector shares its dual-everything safety chain and its dock standard with three siblings on the Movers block — freight, crew and now the smallest, most public payload of the four.
Municipal waste retrieval — a verified, item-by-item collection loop over public space.
Download PDF ↓Freight, moved — the block's baseline mass carrier.
Download PDF ↓Crew, moved — the same safety chain, rated for people aboard.
Download PDF ↓Beyond the freight ladder's ceiling — the block's heaviest lift.
Download PDF ↓If you manage streets, parks or public grounds with a litter obligation and an audit attached, the conversation starts with the beat you need covered — and with the gate built to refuse everything that isn't litter.