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Automated Debris Interceptor
Summary
Researchers built a small robot that uses a camera and smart software to automatically spot plastic trash on sidewalks, pick it up, and sort it away from organic waste. This kind of automated cleanup matters because plastic litter left outdoors breaks down into microplastics that can end up in our water, food, and eventually our bodies, so catching it early, before it fragments, is a practical step toward reducing that exposure.
An automated plastic collector is a robot that gathers waste, such as plastics along with organic materials, found on pavements. The brain of the proposed system is the Arduino Uno R4 Microcontroller, which handles the operation of the ESP-32 camera model, robotic arm, 2200mAh battery and IR-sensor. with this system, the motor along with the sensor is initialized followed by the ESP-32 camera capturing the image and it is stored in the dataset which has been trained by the ML model. If the material identified is not plastic then the arm will grab it and place it into the non-plastic container (which will be referred to as organic waste). If the material can be identified as plastic then the robot place it into the plastic container. In the case of an obstacle detection by the ultrasonic sensor, the automated plastic collector will avoid the obstacle and continue on its path. This process involves utilizing software tools EDGE-IMPULSE to train the model, AURDINO-IDE to merge the sensors with actuators and also enabling tests of the trained model in GOOGLE COLLAB using the YOLO-V8 model.