This past week, I spent a great deal of time working on the design for the robot. I researched existing trash collecting robots (on land/ water) and other mechanisms that collect objects (ex. vacuum cleaners, applications in farming, cleaning, toy-collecting etc.). Last week, we partly decided on the roller mechanism; however, the implementation of the roller itself was not finalized. When we spoke with Professor Marios and Aidan regarding this matter, they were mostly on board with the roller mechanism; however, there were important concerns raised regarding how the robot will pick up smaller trash components (ex. crumpled paper). To fix this we considered adding an axel to allow for roller-movement in the vertical direction.
However, after looking into a multitude of different types of trash-collecting robots, we finalized on a new design, one that combines a rotating fan and a small conveyor belt. This is a unique design that hasn’t been implemented yet on land, hence it will add strong complexitiy to the project as well as provide a durable mechanism to pick up smaller components. The rotating fan will pull the trash component in towards the robot and the conveyor belt will pick it up and place it in the storage area.
Besides coming up with the design and finalizing dimensions (and overall structure), I also worked on the design presentation slides. Considering feedback from the proposal presentation, I redefined testing criteria and our environment/ scope in greater detail. This was an important aspect of our project as it cleared up many of questions we had and received about consideration of the real-world environment regarding the robot. Overall, I am mostly on schedule with the Gantt chart this week; I will be finishing up the week by setting up ROS on the Raspberry PI. Next week, I will be focusing on building the base as well as researching path-planning algorithms and defining the software requirements for movement.
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