Beach Clean Up System

Inspiration

Although clean, our local beaches here in New Jersey are littered with garbage some of which is swept straight into the ocean by the rising tide. And beach litter is not just a local problem but is a problem on thousands of beaches across the world. Taking inspiration from our desire to solve this problem we decided to create our Beach Clean Up System. We were able to design our BeachRover taking inspiration from Perseverance's multi-terrain wheels. Our CoastalClaw was inspired by NASA's multi-jointed Robot Servicing Arm that is able to complete difficult tasks in the vacuum of space.

What it does

Our BeachRover is capable of funneling litter into a centralized area where our CoastalClaw picks up the trash and disposes of it in a garbage bin.

How we built it

Utilizing the many possibilities of Lego Technic and Mindstorms we put together our BeachRover and CoastalClaw and coded it with Mindstorms very own block coding language. We also designed custom 3D printed wheels that were based around the wheels found on Mars Rovers.

Challenges we ran into

Without a doubt creating our CoastalClaw was the most difficult challenge we ran into as it requires the utmost precision, balance, and strength.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Correlating to the previous question we are immensely proud of the fact that we were successfully able to build our CoastalClaw. After overcoming our balance issues and then being able to line everything up perfectly we are definitely ecstatic that the CoastalClaw is successful.

What we learned

After creating this project we learned how long it takes to engineer a project that you are proud of. We originally had zero intent to even create the CoastalClaw and our BeachRover was the most disproportionate robot of all time. We also learned the importance of collaboration and chemistry. Throughout the project we faced many challenges and both of us had our times where we became very frustrated. Having a teammate who can talk some sense into you is always beneficial to the project.

What's next for the Beach Clean Up System

Hopefully we will be able to create a more structurally sound version of our Beach Clean Up System with stronger more stable material like VEX. We would also like to greatly increase the size of the Beach Clean Up System for a higher efficiency. After these improvements we can one day use this on a real beach.