Month: February 2025

Potential Risks and Risk Management
Most of our risks remain the same however, after our design review presentation, we realized that our DC motor would be under a certain level of stress, so to mitigate this, we are making sure to purchase one that is rated for purposes that are slightly more involved than ours. We are also ordering multiple to prevent any roadblocks later in the project. 

Overall Design Changes
No significant changes have been made to our design since the recent change to our sorting mechanism. We did make slight changes to the mechanical parts picked while we finalized the parts to be ordered. Our design report will show the final draft.

Schedule
Currently, there are no major updates to our schedule; however, we have updated it to indicate our progress on ongoing tasks. Since we will be placing orders for parts early next week and anticipate a slight lead time for some of our components, our schedule, specifically the portion corresponding to the conveyor belt assembly, will need to be pushed back by half a week. 

Schedule – Gantt Chart

Progress Update

After John finalized the CAD models for the conveyor belt and sorting mechanism, we collectively finalized the parts to be ordered for the conveyor belt, sorting mechanism, and object detection. We hope to submit the appropriate forms at the beginning of the week. 

Potential Risks and Risk Management
The most significant risks we anticipate for this project are the same as last week. In a nutshell, servo load rating, and mechanical failure are the biggest risks. We do have risk management mechanisms in place, and these were hashed out in the previous team status report.  

Overall Design Changes
We made a change to our sorting mechanism. Previously, we chose to have mechanical sweepers that push materials (glass, paper, plastic, metal) into their respective bins. However, after John started designing the conveyor belt, we found this mechanism to be slightly less feasible. Instead, we decided to pivot to using a swivel mechanism wherein all objects fall off the conveyor belt’s end and are then sorted. The sorting is done with a custom ramp that rotates and drops each object off in its appropriate bin. To accommodate the time it takes for the swivel to transport the objects, we will be modifying the object detection sequence. The design changes will be elaborated on in our design report. 

Schedule
Currently, there are no major updates to our schedule, however, we have updated it to indicate our progress on ongoing tasks.

Schedule – Gantt Chart

 Progress Update
As mentioned in Mohammed’s status report, we experimented with a few pre-trained models and settled to use a YOLOv5 implementation. Fine-tuning will be necessary due to the model recognizing trash as recyclable material in addition to miscategorizing other recyclable waste.  John’s status report indicates the substantial completion of a majority of our mechanical design, and it will soon be ready for manual assembly.

Applications of Solution
Part A (Written by Erin)
Our product is tailored to ultimately impact the welfare of society through efficient recycling mechanisms. Our research has shown us that a lot of times, batches of recycled items are contaminated with debris causing these items to no longer be eligible for recycling purposes. Through our solution of automated trash sorting, we’ll be able to reduce the amount of recycling that is rendered ineligible and eventually contribute towards cleaner living environments for all. This result is possible due to less trash ending up in landfills, and subsequently fewer contaminants in the air. Good recycling mechanisms will also aid in maintaining resource availability for future generations. Our product is designed to be efficient, and scalable, and we believe that its incorporation into material recovery facilities will help streamline and improve the recycling conundrum that is ever present in our world. 

Part B (Written by Mohammed)
A particular societal factor our solution targets is ignorance to recycling requirements and regulations. In many places and cultures, what constitutes recyclable waste is not immediately obvious, which leads to people inappropriately categorizing their trash. Our project reduces the reliance on individual awareness by automatically and efficiently sorting the miscategorized trash. Furthermore, we intend on solving the potential challenge of product accessibility by designing an affordable and scalable system that can be accessed by both the public and private sector. That way, our solution can be deployed in not only wealthy governments and sorting facilities but also relatively poorer ones. 

Part C (Written by John)
The economics of our project are kept in check with our requirement of a low cost to prototyping our system. The product will also consist of a lot of off-the-shelf parts so it will be more feasible to connect with suppliers to reasonably assemble our project. The few parts that are custom-made are only custom to lower costs in our prototyping phase, but they can be reasonably fitted with other off-the-shelf parts to ease production. Since this project is meant to be used by larger bodies such as companies and government entities, which are typically more regulated, it will not hold the concerns of wide-spread distribution with other products that would be marketed to individuals and civilian consumers. The use case of the project designates it to be stationary throughout its usage and life cycle, so it would be feasible to distribute and deploy the product to specific facilities in a controlled manner. The product will solely contribute towards the goals of the facilities it is owned by, so there are likely little to no consequences of its use long-term.

Potential Risks and Risk Management

The most significant risks that we anticipate for this project are:

Servo Load Rating
In our project proposal, we indicated that we expect our system to be able to accurately classify 25’’ diameter, 10-pound objects. Given these conditions, we are uncertain if simple servos will be able to handle this load. In addition to this, timing synchronization will be pivotal for our product to work as expected. To address these risks, we have identified possible alternatives.

• Use a servo rated for higher loads (7kg, 25kg, etc.)
• Implement an additional stabilizer for servo actuation in the conveyor belt design

Mechanical Failure
The conveyor belt breaks or stalls, thus increasing the latency of the system. To address these issues, we have outlined strict prototyping requirements for our initial stages.

• Stress Test System Design 
  • Place 6 objects of a maximum of 10 pounds onto the belt
  • Allow the conveyor system to run at 0.68mph (based on proposal) and check functionality

Overall Design Changes
No significant changes were made to our design. This may change as we solidify our system architecture. We have upcoming goals of completing the CAD Model of the conveyor belt by 09/02/2025, and the entire system design architecture by 11/02/2025. 

Schedule
Currently, there are no major updates to our schedule, however, we have updated it to indicate our progress on ongoing tasks.

Schedule – Gantt Chart

 Progress Update
With a spare NVIDIA Jetson Nano, our team was able to boot up the Jetson successfully. We ran into some issues initially with regard to the system getting overloaded every time we plugged in a USB, however, we were able to quickly get past this by using a 5V 3+A power brick. We were also able to connect the Jetson to WiFi using this Spark Fun guide. For our object detection mechanism, we decided that we would be using a YOLO model, and so we decided to test whether the Jetson could successfully launch an existing program.

Our Jetson Nano successfully running a YOLO Model 

In addition to this, we also worked on our parts list, cross-listing items that we needed with the CMU Inventory, and also considering tradeoffs with components that are currently in the inventory vs. other unlisted suppliers.