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Tate’s Status Report for 3/6

This week, I have been helping my team with our design review presentation slides for our presentation next week. I will be presenting for my team, so I have also been preparing for that as well.  Additionally, I put the first round of order requests in for our sensors so that we can begin testing when those come in as well. I have been trying to look into which sliding mechanism design will be best for our bin, but honestly did not allocate enough time to work on the project this week and to finalize whether a belt system or gear system would be quicker and more reliable due to other conflicts.

My progress is behind schedule because as of Saturday, I was not able to finalize the mechanism design. While my team has narrowed it down to two possible designs, I haven’t been able to fully confirm the better approach. This may require some peer feedback, testing, and more research to determine. I do feel that my team’s design presentation will be ready on time.

In the next week, I hope to decide which mechanism is best, retrieve our ordered sensors so that we can start testing them on different objects to see what are the best ways to incorporate the sensors into our classifiers, and layout a draft for our design report.

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Tate’s Status Report for 2/27

This week, I helped my team finalize our project proposal presentation slides for our presentation which occurred on Monday. After our presentation and having received some feedback, I did some more research on sensors that we could add to our design. I also worked with my team to develop a more appropriate accuracy rate for our recyclable items. Most recently, I put in our first order requests for some sensors so that we can begin testing them as soon as possible.

My progress is on schedule as I ordered our first round of sensors so that we can begin testing them soon, which is on track with our overall plan.

In the next week, I hope to begin work on testing the sensors I ordered so that I can help my team better gauge the type of input we will need from the sensors in order to successfully be able to classify waste items. With this information, I hope to have a better idea of how we will position the sensors within our smart trash bin.

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Lauren’s Status Report for 2/27

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

This week I presented the proposal presentation. Based on the feedback we got after the presentation, I helped refine our requirements for accuracy and latency to better reflect our goal for the project. Previously, we had more a minimum for these statistics rather than a maximum, so changing them was necessary.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is on schedule.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to finalize the components needed (including the mechanism) for the project, so the team can start buying more parts. I also want to start testing various objects with the sensors ordered to determine whether they will work for the project.

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Jessica’s Status Report for 2/27

This week, I mainly researched different sensors so that we could submit our first purchase request by the end of this week. I tried to find sensors with a decent sensing range that fit within our budget, but most sensors have around an 8mm range. From the sensors that I researched, we ended up purchasing an inductive, capacitive, and load sensor. My group also met with our TA to further discuss our mechanism and our requirements. After our discussion, we decided to tighten the requirements to 90% classification accuracy and 1-2 second latency.

Our project is still on-schedule. Next week, I plan to finalize our mechanism, order the mechanism parts, and prepare for our design presentation.

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Team Status Report for 2/27

From last week, we changed several of our requirements to improve the use case of our product. For classification accuracy, we increased the requirement from 31% to 90% accuracy. For latency, we decreased the time from 2-3 seconds to 1-2 seconds. Both of these changes will make designing our classifier and mechanism more challenging, but they will significantly improve the user experience and overall system. With a reduced latency and increased classification accuracy, the user can place items into the trash can and sort them both reliably and quickly.

The most significant risks we are currently facing are meeting the range requirements of our sensors and reducing the overall latency. We plan to purchase multiple sensors to build a sensor array, but that method might become too expensive, depending on how much of our budget we can dedicate towards purchasing more sensors. We had also intended to embed most of the sensors underneath the platform, but after some research, that might not an option for some sensors. In terms of latency, we plan to finalize the dimensions of our project and pick out motors next week to ensure that our mechanism can meet the latency requirement. As a back-up plan, we are researching other potential mechanisms including a swiveling platform which might be able to move items faster to each bin.

Our project is still on track. This week, we presented our proposal and submitted an order request for our sensors as planned. Next week, we will finish finalizing the mechanism and continue ordering parts.

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Jessica’s Status Report for 2/20

This week, I helped to narrow down the scope of our project and further develop our project. Specifically, I researched  potential sensors that we could use in the case that our classifier was not accurate enough. We ended up choosing an IR and inductive sensor that were mentioned in a garbage segregation research paper that I had found. I also helped to finalize our mechanism and modify our proposal presentation slides due this weekend .

Our project is still on-schedule. During the week, we had to schedule extra meetings with our professor and TA to address some problems with our idea, but we have now resolved all of those issues.

Next week, I plan to start the design process including finalizing budget, making preliminary sketches of the mechanism, and beginning to prepare for our design presentation in two weeks.

 

Some resources for sensors:

https://lillych.in/files/Chin-2019-icra.pdf

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1007/1/012057/pdf

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Lauren’s Status Report for 2/20

 

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).

I helped finalize the categories that would be determined in classification, and narrowed the scope of some of the objects considered recyclable (like only considering plastic bottles as recyclable vs. all other plastics). I also researched additional sensors for plastic and glass detection because I figured out capacitive sensors may not have a large enough sensing range to work for our project. In particular, I found that light sensors will work best to detect transparent materials like glass. Jessica and I finalized the mechanism (sliding box) that the items will be moved with, and we also finished most of the slides for the proposal.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

My progress is on schedule.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to present the proposal slides, and get started on the design presentation afterwards.

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Team Status Report for 2/20

  • What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

The classification of items may be very difficult, considering we need to distinguish between items with different materials (i.e. metals vs. glass vs. paper). It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of our classifier until we begin implementing it, so we are going to add more sensor input. We are now using a variety of sensors, in addition to the camera, that can help us distinguish between the different materials. We plan to use an inductive sensor for detecting metals. We looked into using capacitive sensors for other material detection, but these can be very expensive with tiny sensing range. Our backup sensors include an LDR sensor for detecting plastics and glass. 

  • Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

From the abstract, we have narrowed down the scope of our project and introduced different sensor inputs other than the camera. In particular, we have more clearly defined which items are considered recyclable (i.e. limiting recyclable plastics to just plastic water bottles). This changes the use case for our project, but makes classification more feasible. We have also reduced the number of sorting categories because having multiple categories for recyclables did not significantly improve our use case, and it overcomplicated our mechanism.

We also changed our mechanism for moving the item from the sorting platform to the recycling or non-recycling bins. Instead of a tilting platform that will tilt the item into one of the two bins, our mechanism will be a sliding box that will slide over a motor track and push the item into one of the bins. This change was necessary because we previously weren’t using sensors that need to be in close proximity or attached to it.There are no costs from this change because the sliding mechanism will still be able to put an item into one of the bins.

We also altered our use case from individual households to CMU campus, because it seemed more reasonable that a college campus would be more focused on improving recycling rather than individuals who don’t already recycle (and consequently, would not be interested in buying our product).

  • Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

We are still on track to finish our proposal presentation this weekend and begin the design process next week. 

  • This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working.

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Tate’s Status Report for 2/20/21

This week, I worked with my team, our professor, and our TA to narrow down the scope of our project and to clarify some design choices for our product. Having decided to incorporate more sensors into our trash bin in order to better classify items of waste, I did some research on what types of additional sensors would be best for identifying various materials. Researched sensors (such as inductive and capacitive sensors) and their functionality were added to a shared Google Doc with the rest of my team. I also helped my team clarify and modify our target audience (CMU campus trash bin), purpose (increase recycling rate and decrease contamination rate), and functionality (automatically separates recyclables from trash one item at a time). Another accomplishment this week was making significant headway on the Project Proposal Slides, which contain the most up-to-date specifics on the project. I have attached the Google Doc that my team and I have been brainstorming on here: Proposal Draft.

I feel that our progress is now on schedule. I was a little worried that we were behind in the middle of the week as my team had to meet with our professor and TA in order to straighten some project ideas out. Specifically, we narrowed down the types of recyclables that we would be classifying to 3 main categories and we decided to add more sensors than just a camera to our trash bin. I believe that we were able to resolve these issues quickly and that we are on track to finish up our Project Proposal Slides by the end of the week.

In the next week, I am really focused on making sure that my team’s Project Proposal slides are complete and submitted by the end of the weekend. I then plan to help my team prepare for our proposal presentations which are taking place next week.  I want to ensure that we have a clear and complete presentation that has been thoroughly thought out. I am looking forward to sharing our project idea with everyone.