September – December 2021

Motivation: Making it easy for people with disability or to avoid forgetting to move the trash to the curb side on trash day

Objective: To make autonomous trash moving robot which moves from a pre-defined source to destination

Details: We were a team of five who contributed to making this project under the guidance of our professor. The source is predefined currently by placing the robot manually and the destination is identified when both the light sensors detect tape on the ground. Turtlebot with Kobuki base, Raspberry Pi, ultrasonic, and light sensors in conjunction with obstacle avoidance and line following algorithms were used to complete this project. ROS twist message commands were sent to turtlebot using a python script to make the robot move.

A proportional feedback controller (Kp) was used to keep track of the robot’s current heading to adjust angular velocity to stop rotation when the desired heading is achieved. This was required as due to inertia, without this solution, the robot was not stopping at the desired heading.

Through this project, I came to learn ROS (Robot Operating System) and Raspberry Pi and solving the challenges faced while operating it remotely.