Ramudroid is an ingeniously build robot to clean outdoors and alleys( gullies) inspired by “Bharat Swachhata Abhiyaan” or Clean India Mission. The idea is to tackle the problem of litter and trash alongside roads and lanes by using 3 brush system to target and lift small objects like plastic cups, wrappers, leaves etc. Read more
Ramudorid v7 is powered by solar energy, it uses camera’s media stream to identify target garbage type and 3 brush design to lift up small objects like plastic cups, wrappers, leaves etc. The autonomous droid also provides real-time camera stream and detects obstruction to reroute itself. It can communicate over 4G, WiFi and BLE and uses edge computation to collect and analyse data on garbage spotted and collected.
The robot is divided into 4 parts which are as follows
1. Driving Unit
The driving unit consists of 4 wheel to drive the setup. Wheels must be tightly fixed into position to prevent them from tilting, spreading outwards and balancing the load.
A pair of rear wheels with controllers 12 V + DC motors with 300 RPM connected with a pair front freewheels make up the necessary 4 wheel system to drive the robot. Motors are connected to Arduino for receiving commands for start, stop, left or right navigation.
There are three input pins for each motor, including Input1 (IN1), Input2 (IN2), and Enable1 (EN1) for Motor1 and Input3, Input4, and Enable2 for Motor2.
2. Cleaning Unit
Uses 3 tough bristled brushes controlled by 3 5V DC gear motors with 60 RPM. The arrangement of the brushes is such that the bottom 2 brushes use clockwise and anticlockwise motion outwards to pull in the litter and push up with the flow of the air and bristles of the brush. The third brush combs the collected into the collector tray. The tray is attached to the weight control system to stop operations when critical weight is reached to prevent overloading the robot
3. Body and chassis
The litter is collected in a translucent plastic bin of dimensions 20 x 30 X 20 cm. It can bear the weight of up to 2 kgs of litter. IR proximity sensors provide an indication for bin being full up to its capacity.
Wheels of 10 cm diameter rubber grip hold the weight of the assembly. The chassis is build of Aluminium for its characteristic lightweight and strength.
4. Control and Communication Unit
Object Detection and Garbage spotting CNN models on a real-time WebRTC stream.
Communication is on LTE using available 4G as a backbone to communicate between robots and centralised server with high GPU for object recognition and classification. It should be noted that
Object Detection and Classification — I have written a separate article on techniques experimented with for garbage classification using plain HAAR to deep CNN models optimised for high FPS.
Prototype Development stages :
Frame and wheel
Scenarios
Good Sunlight scenario: This 12 Volt solar panel provides about 2.5 Amps of current on average during the daytime. In such a situation it is directly used to drive the machine’s motors for wheels and brushes and electrical components such as PI and Arduino. In no motion of rest conditions, the generated power is used to charge the attached backup battery.
Shady/evening/morning scenario: When the panel is not receiving direct or strong sunlight, the power generated is less hence not sufficient to take the load of driving the wheels for movement. Hence is the power falls below a certain prespecified threshold, the current is drawn from battery backup.
Night / No sunlight Scenario: The battery is used to power the setup and panel can be dismounted to lower the load.
Contributing to Ramudroid Project or Reuse
It is designed and developed as an Open-source project and all contributions and pull requests are good to have :)
Originally published at http://telecom.altanai.com on December 9, 2018.
