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Automated Debris Interceptor
Summary
Researchers built a small robot that uses a camera and artificial intelligence to spot plastic trash on sidewalks and sort it from organic waste automatically. While this study focused on the robot's engineering rather than health outcomes, tools like this matter because getting plastic waste out of our environment before it breaks down helps reduce the tiny plastic particles (microplastics) that can end up in our water, food, and eventually our bodies.
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.