Trash Sorting Robot
Duo "Steve" Wang • John Yap • Jeffrey Fisher II • Katherine Bernhardt
TAMUmake 2019
TAMUmake is a hardware hackathon hosted every year by the Texas A&M branch of IEEE in which teams compete to create a project in 24 hours. To learn more about this amazing event put on by IEEE please visit the following website: TAMUmake.com
Problem
People throw garbage away in the wrong trash cans all the time. Deciding what bin your garbage goes in is both time consuming and confusing, so many of us make a quick choice and often it is the wrong one. If we want a sustainable future this is not ok, and there must be a change.
Solution
If the trash can was to sort the trash for you, then no one would ever need to think about it. That is exactly what my team and I set out to make. We decided that the best way to accomplish this was by recognizing the object then using two sets of trap doors to sort the trash between recycle, compost, and general garbage.
Design
To plan the over all construction of the product, my team and I decided that it would be useful to design the structure in Autodesk Inventor. This allowed for us to reduce the waste of materials during construction. In addition, it made it much easier to build because we already knew how we were planning to build it.
Build
Structure
For building the structure of the robot, we used quarter inch foam core board. Since we had very detailed CAD models we were able to quickly assemble the prototype. Any structural flaws found during constructions were addressed by adding trangular supports.
Servo Control
For processing camera images as well as controlling all four servos, an Arduino Mega was used. This allowed for a relatively simple setup on the software side of things.
Notification System
In addition to sorting the trash, we also wanted to make the custodial staffs life easier by notifying them when the trash bags are full. To accomplish this, a Particle Argon was used to connect to wifi and send a notification saying which trash bag was full. To sense if the trash bag was full we used ultrasonic sensors to determine the height of the trash in each bag. We also added three LED's on the side of the lid to have a visual indication.
Software
Arduino
The Arduino was in charge of receiving the input from the Pixy camera and turning the servos in the correct order and direction to allow for the trash to end up in the correct bin. Since we only had 24 hours we used a Pixy to detect the colors of objects for the demo, but this would later be adapted to a computer vision technique that would be better suited for identifying different items.
Raspberry Pi
While getting the core design working, on the side we tried to get a raspberry pi to detect objects to put them in the correct bins. We did end up getting this working, however we didn't have enough time to implement it in the final design.
Particle Argon
The Argon was connected to three ultrasonic sensors, when one of the sensors detected that the trash was too close, it sent a signal over wifi to an app called If This Then That, IFTTT, which then sent a text to my phone. It also had to turn on the corresponding LED until the trash was empty.
Github
To view the software we developed, please visit the following Github repository:
The End
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