We thought about ways to increase environmental sustainability. Being in the walls of Georgia Tech, we naturally thought of swarm robotics - something that GT leads the field in.
What if we could unleash a swarm to help us keep settings like public parks, amusement parks, and zoos clean? Just deploy them and rest assured the job will be done. They could also be used to rove and make sure trash levels don't exceed a certain threshold. That not only helps with cleanliness but improves the smell and air quality of any place fortunate enough to have our lovable robot crew.
The name came from the lovable robot WALL-E. The ace is a play on words that is meant to stand for sustainability :).
For this project, we could build one of those robots. That would entail:
- Custom designed and manufactured parts ✅
- Motors for travel and trash process ✅
- Camera for navigation and object detection ✅ Optional:
- Web interface to see the status of all the robots ✅
- Other ways of communicating with the robots, like on-demand sms status requests ✅
Every part of the project was difficult, but building the electrical system of our robot was the toughest due to scarcity of materials. Motors and sufficient battery power were of short supply.
The software was built using a variety of technologies.
Message passing using sockets, object detection, and raspberry pi communication was done with Python. Web server, React frontend, and sms functionality was done with Javascript. Hardware controlling was done with an Arduino.
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