Introduction:

As the plastic wave is constantly hitting the oceans, there is a need for certain actions that can nullify the effects of these plastics both to marine and human lives. The gateway for the plastics to enter the oceans are ocean shores. As the plastic bottles, cups etc., gets accumulated at shores, and pulled away by the ocean waves as the water passes over them. Besides, some of the plastic bottles or cups partially immersed in the sands of oceans shores, it becomes difficult to manually collect them. So , we designed a robot know as "Tiger Bot" which comes with a image recognition camera which was initially trained to certain images of plastic bottles , Cups and others which often appears on the shores. When it gets detected, it triggers the robotic arm attached infront of the robot and then it picks up those plastic trash. The tiger bot is designed as rocker bogie structure so that it can freely moves over the uneven surfaces of the ocean shores. Currently, we prototyped the defined concept and requires further add-ons like where to put the collected trash and how effectively. For this, we are planning to build bigger version of this robot with container so that the collected plastics can be stored in those containers. We used black stripes on the robot that represents the Indian national animal (White Bengal Tiger).

Working:

The tiger bot consists of a camera know as "Pixy" which has a built in image processor that can be used to train upto 10 signature values ( obejcts). So, it suits well for our prototype model. Once trained, it is ready to identify the objects placed before it. Here we trained a orange coloured plastic box.

The below links provided the camera view of plastic box and it's signature.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11HFeD9OPKC0nii-Q7...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11HjvOEXRCllQ6zDjP...

Few more photos of Tiger Bot:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11LDSAFXaR1OVQatZZ...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11QsqHo5MDriqES6Y0...

Components Used:

1. Arduino Uno

2. Pixy Camera

3. Robotic Arm

4. Four Channel Really Module.

5. Rocker Bogie Structure made from PVC pipes.

6. Solar Panel for power.

7. GPS for locating the Bot.

8. DC motors.

Softwares Used:

1. Arduino IDE.

2. Pixy Mon.

Resources:

The below resources from NASA satellites are helpful for us to identify from where exactly the plastics are releasing into the oceans so that we can pin that shore as a major concern and deploy the robot. Also the robot will be feed with that location so that it can automatically directs itself towards that location and picks them up.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004100/a004...

https://podaac-tools.jpl.nasa.gov/hitide/#id=UTeTt...

Visualisation of sea surface temperatures that helps to get more information regarding plastics as they trap the heat. This enables us to find where more temperature signatures of the shore means more plastics accumulated at that place and becoming major entry into sea water.

https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-149.76773...

Future Work:

Further, we want to make a bigger version of this robot and place container boxes so that the collected plastics can be stored properly. Also, we want to make it autonomous so that it can drive itself by mapping the surroundings of shores this effectively collecting the plastics.