Ocean Surface Trash Collector

摘要

This paper describes the design of a robot for collecting waste floating on the water surface. Three important issues for designing the aquatic robots are a cost-effective solution along with robustness and durability. Due to the nature of the cleaning work, we designed the robot structure with car like mechanism that can provide high stability, good ability in maneuver and can easily collect all the waste flowing on the water. The plastic pipe container works best for this case and fulfils all structural stability criteria. For collection of waste, a motor-driven conveyor belt has been designed for collecting the wastes and deploy it into a plastic box connected to the platform. This design provides simple and effective waste removal and accommodates large amounts of waste within a little space. This light-weight and tough structure support the total weight of the collected waste, conveyor as well as the hardware components used. The rotating arms system based a differential drive mechanism has been designed, which allows the robots to require a 360 turn on the spot and provides high thrust. Electronic circuit and motors have been placed on the platform, in order to protect them from water. The robot is automatically controlled by Arduino, sensors, motor driver, GPS and GSM modules. The testing of the robot prototype proved to be effective in waste collecting and getting back to the way-point. The maximum trash loads that robot can bear is up 5 kg. The main aim of the project is to optimize time, energy and overall process speed.