Litterally Trash – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Litterally Trash

Timeline

Fall 2019 – Spring 2020

Students

Shreyosii Endow
Johan Barradas
Rajvi Tiwari
Luis Flores
Daeyoung Lee
Muhammad Siddiqui
Gerardo Rodriguez
Osbaldo Alvarado
Tyler Nguyen

Abstract

Littering is a persisting problem that has made solving pollution exponentially difficult. With the lack of manpower available to reduce the amount of trash, an ideal solution is to delegate the work to an autonomous robot. It would be able to operate without any human input needed, tirelessly working hours without any complaining, picking up trash left out on the streets overnight and dispensing in the proper place. Its compact design will allow the robot to be applied to a variety of different places, like after public events, parades, indoor parties, and so much more. The design of the robot will be made modular and easy to fix should any damage happen. This also means that in the future if any upgrades to any components are needed or made, the robot can be quickly and efficiently modified without having to completely re-engineer its entire frame and reduce the cost of maintenance. Being lightweight prevents the machine from causing extensive damage to both the environment and to bystanders walking while the robot operates. And while the collection of trash is the most important aspect of its mission, it would be counter-intuitive to do so if the litterers are allowed to continue to enact their heinous deeds on a daily basis. To resolve this, the robot is capable of communicating to the perpetrators to hold them accountable for their actions and keep them from repeating their distasteful behavior. With these capabilities, the robot will play a huge role in cleaning up the busy streets of a concrete jungle.

Background

Pollution is an ever-lasting problem in the modern world. Cities are expanding and growing at a rampant pace, with the population congesting every square inch they can get their hands on. Because of this, litter has drowned every major metropolitan areas and have sullied the streets we walk on every day. Society has a problem by the frequent, unethical disposal of trash because it is too inconvenient to reach for a trashcan or find a recycle bin. And while janitorial jobs exist, it would require an unrealistic amount of manpower to fully cover the scope of worldwide littering. Machines simply do not require the motivation or paycheck humans do, and autonomy can provide the available tools to allow the robot to get better and more efficient at detecting and picking up trash. This application promotes the idea of how technology can be implemented to assist and correct areas that humans have failed in for years.

Robots like these will be tested at IEEE’s Robotics Competition, an organization that gives students the ability to develop and hone their craft while working in a team in order to achieve a greater goal for humanity. Making such a project a contest allows the solution to be as dynamic and diverse as possible since teams will be competing, requiring a great amount of creativity in order to win. With the rules and specifications set by the IEEE, the partnership between them and competing teams allow us to truly test the robot’s capabilities in as real of a setting as possible. The application of a litter cleaning robot has many possibilities, and as trash continues to pile up today, this project already has plenty of opportunities to flourish.

Project Requirements

The robot shall operate autonomously without human input (with the exception of a start and stop command).
The robot shall be able to detect and recognize 4 types of litter: Bags of chips, paper trays, aluminum cans, and plastic water bottles.
The robot shall be able to pick up all 4 types of litter on the playing field. The method of collection is up to each team, so long as the mechanism follows all other competition rules.
The robot shall be able to hold all trash collected by its mechanism as it traverses and operates on the playing field.
The robot shall be able to dispense all trash stored in its bins.
The robot shall conform to a size restriction of 2 ft. x 2 ft. x 2 ft., but may extend outside of the starting volume to a 3 ft. radius cylinder only after a round has begun.
The robot shall not weigh more than 25 pounds (not including the pieces of litter collected) to prevent extensive damage to the competition field or game pieces (litter).
The robot shall contain an emergency stop button that is easily visible and accessible in the event that the robot would cause harm or extensive damage. When the button is pressed, the robot should immediately stop all operations.
The robot shall not contain any hazardous materials that could harm people, the litterbug, or any game pieces, including but not limited to sharp edges, exposed electrical contacts, or any mechanisms that throws litter outside of the playing field.

System Overview

The achieve the goal of this project, a cube like robot will be constructed. The frame will be made of wood to allow for easy modifications and in order to conform to the weight limit set by the competition rules. A wooden frame is also much cheaper than a metal frame and does not require any special orders to obtain and is much lighter in weight. It also allows us to make future changes should any upgrades be necessary. It will be supported by light aluminum beans for stability. The collection mechanism will be a spinning, horizontal brush that will push any pieces of litter up a ramp from the front of the robot. Its movement will be powered by two wheels on the side and a castor wheel in the front. This setup allows for a differential drive to give our robot the agility to spin and turn in order to pick up and move efficiently. Each wheel will be powered by its own motor. The bin will be placed in the middle of the robot where it will receive any pieces of litter pushed up by the brush and be tilted by by servo motors. Both the bin and the ramp will be made from cardboard.

The robot will be controller remotely via an ssh into the Jetson Nano. This allows us to send a signal to turn on/off the robot without having to physically press a button every time to turn it on/off, which means the robot can be quickly started and stopped. Competition rules require a visibly obvious and easily accessible emergency stop button to be present on the robot. This button will immediately disconnect the battery from every component, preventing the robot from operating in the event that it may cause harm to people or damage to the competition field.

The robot will be operating autonomously through the use of the Jetson Nano processor. Connected to it is a front facing camera and a LIDAR positioned on the underside of the robot. The LIDAR will be used to map out the competition field and give the Nano the position of the robot relative to the borders of the playing field. The position of the Litterbug will also be detected by the LIDAR. The camera will be used to detect the pieces of trash by sending frames of the environment to the Nano for image processing. The Jetson Nano will be running ROS in order to move the robot by operating on the motor controllers controlling the motors of the wheels/brush. A battery will power all the components on the robot.

Results

Demo:

Future Work

Currently, the robot collects all pieces of trash in its path by using a spinning brush into a box mounted on the frame. Once the robot has properly positioned itself next to a trash bin, it dispenses its entire collection into a trash bin. While this method maximizes the quantity of litter collected, it does not consider different litter types. For example, 2 of the 4 types of litter used in the competition are recyclable (plastic bottles and aluminum cans) and can be placed in special bins. Future implementations should be able to efficiently and properly differentiate between the different types of litter and properly dispense them in their correct bins. Potential solutions include partitioning the storage container on the robot into sections that hold a specific type of litter, with some mechanism that has the ability to diverge the direction of incoming litter into their appropriate sections. The robot would then be able to dispense one type of litter at a time depending on the disposal bin it is positioned next to.