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Back View
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Our robot in the building stage
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Side View
Inspiration
When we heard of this hackathon's theme, we thought about how recycling and waste management can bring materials "full circle", as well as how cleaning up trash can make communities look better. We wanted to build a solution to help clean up the enormous amount of waste in the world.
What it does
TrashBot uses a webcam and claw to both detect waste and clean it up autonomously. It also has an app to provide manual control of the robot.
How we built it
We built the base of the robot using a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and Servos. We mounted a webcam on top of the robot which streams video back to the computer. The camera automatically differentiates garbage from other objects using OpenCV. The claw of the robot is controlled using an Arduino, which communicates with a mobile app.
Challenges we ran into
We were unable to transfer the sensor and video data from the EV3 to the host computer. We spent at least two hours working on this problem alone before deciding to work around it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of how we were able to get the webcam video to stream and build the robot. Especially since most of the hackathons we have been to have been 24 hours long, we were proud of how much we were able to get done.
What we learned
We learned how to use OpenCV, a new python computer vision library which process images and detects major objects.
What's next for TrashBot
We need to figure out how to stream the video from the EV3 to the computer. Also, we need to resolve false-positives in the waste detection program; occasionally, items that are not waste were recognized as waste.
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