Inspiration
At our university accommodations, people don't recycle properly and often put rubbish in the wrong bins, because of this we were inspired to create this project. We saw this problem and thought it would be a good idea to design a system where AI was used to sort rubbish instead thereby solving a big problem in university accommodations.
What it does
A user places rubbish on the platform, the camera will then take a picture of the rubbish and AI is then used to determine whether the rubbish is glass, paper or plastic. The platform is then rotated to the correct bin and it dumps the rubbish.
How we built it
The main intricate hardware was designed in blender and then 3D printed. We used python for the AI part and used arduino and arduino components to do the electronics.
Challenges we ran into
When we went to 3D print the original design but found out that it would take way too long because we had too much to print. Our solution to this was to cut out less intricate parts of the design which we could make without printing and find other ways to make them.
Finding a dataset representative of the problem we tried to solve was a challenge. We tried all kinds of datasets and they usually didn't work well, we even considered making our own dataset from scratch but we knew that it wasn't very do-able in 24 hours. In the end we managed to train an AI model with a dataset, it wasn't 100% accurate but it worked well enough.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The hardware side of the project worked perfectly as intended by the end, the designs were printed very well indicating a great skill of CAD.
What we learned
We learned patience and how to change our plans to better suit the situation when things were going wrong. We learned to adapt and work well under the pressure of a very short deadline in order to make the best project that we could, especially when problems with AI and hardware came up and we had to alter our plans slightly to deal with the new situations.
What's next for AI recycling robot
This design was just a prototype so it doesn't look very sophisticated, however in future iterations we plan to polish up the design and create something stronger that can sort better with more categories and carry more weight, ideally made with better materials as well.
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