2014 3rd International Conference on Informatics, Environment, Energy and Applications

IPCBEE vol.66 (2014) © (2014) IACSIT Press, Singapore

DOI: 10.7763/IPCBEE. 2014. V66. 19

Garbage Collection Robot on the Beach using Wireless

Communications

Sirichai Watanasophon and Sarinee Ouitrakul 

Department of Electrical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering at Si Racha, Kasetsart University Si Racha Campus
Chonburi, Thailand

Abstract. This article presents the garbage collection robot on the beach using wireless communications.
The robot is built on the caterpillar wheels, sizes 52x74x17 cm and the power is supplied from 12V 30Ah
battery which is connected to 40W solar cells. The user can control a robot via a program developed from
Visual Basic 2005 application based on Window XP. The commands from user are sent via bluetooth to
PIC18F4550 for processing. In addition, it is also equipped with an IP camera with added pan/tilt capabilities
which relays feedback information to the human operator via Ad-hoc system. The results of robot
performances were found that the robot can move with an average speed of 0.5 meters per second on the sand
via wireless communication and collect the big garbage with side 12.5 x 49 cm, for example, glass bottles,
and plastic, etc. From the experimental results, it can clearly indicate that the proposed robot is superior to
handle tasking conveniently, control capability, and operate environmentally friendly.
Keywords: robot, wireless communications, Ad-hoc network, garbage collecting robot, solar energy,
PIC18F4550

1. Introduction
Garbage is a major problem worldwide attention. It can be seen from organizations that support and fix
this problem, such as Ocean Conservancy [1] that is a non-profit environmental advocacy group based in
Washington, D.C., United States. The organization reports on 23 August 2013 that over the past 27 years,
over 9.5 million volunteers have removed 163 million pounds of trash from more than 330,000 miles of
coastline and waterways in 153 countries and locations. At the present, more than 10 million pounds of trash
along nearly 20,000 miles of coastlines were picked up by more than 550,000 people. In Thailand, this
problem affects to the destruction of the beautiful scenery and attractions. Moreover, it causes the problem
about the sea animal death. For example, the death of the whale on the beach, Patong, Phuket [2] because it
eats the plastic waste. Although, some organizations [3] try to clean the beach but the amount of the trash on
the beach is still increasing at all time. Therefore, the development of the technology such as robot for
collecting the garbage is the one aspect that is interested.
Until now, the service robots about cleaning robot for the swimming pools [4], the house [5], the wall [6]
and the domestic stairs [7]) are interested and developed continually but the cleaning robot for the beach
does not be much interested. Therefore, this paper presents the development of a prototype garbage
collection robot on the beach. This robot uses the Bluetooth for communication between the user and the
robot. Moreover, IP camera with added pan/tilt capabilities can send the image data to the user via the Ad-
hoc system. The details of this paper are organized as follows. In section 2, we will introduce the material
and methods of the robot including the hardware and software implements. The result of the experiment and
the conclusion will be described in section 3andsection 4 respectively.


Corresponding author. Tel.: +66 (0)38 354849-52 ext. 2818; fax: + 66 (0)38 354849.
E-mail address: sarinee@[Link].
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2. Material and Methods
This section describes the hardware and software implements. The complete system of garbage
collection robot can be shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.

Robot

RS 232
Bluetooth LCD
module PIC 18F4550
Computer Controller
Board
Motor Control
Ad-hoc IP Camera Board

Fig. 1: Hardware architecture of garbage collection robot

V and I of battery

Control
Battery PIC 18F4550 LCD
Charger

Solar cell

Fig. 2: Hardware architecture of power supply of the garbage collection robot

2.1. Hardware Implement

The complete system of garbage collection robot is divided into 5 major parts: (1) power consumption,
(2) structure and configuration of the robot, (3) microcontroller, (4) wireless communication module, and (5)
IP wireless camera. The details of specifications for this robot can be shown in Table 1.

2.1.1. Power consumption

The primary source of power for the robot is the sealed lead acid battery (12V 30Ah). The voltage
regulator (LM7805) is used to reduce the 12 Vdc from battery to 5 Vdc for supplying the microcontroller and
IP wireless camera. Optoisolator is used to pass the signal from the microcontroller to drive the gate of the
RFP50N that is used to drive the motor at 12Vdc. Forty watts of solar cell is used to charge the battery. In
this paper, we will not explain the detail of the solar cell design.

2.1.2. Structure and configuration of the robot

solar cell

control circuits

shovel
trash box

Fig. 3: The prototype of the garbage collection robot

The structure of the robot is made of aluminums sizes 52x74x17 centimeters. The shovel of the
robot width is 49 centimeters and the trash box in the robot sizes 35x36x40 centimeters. The
prototype of the robot can be shown in Fig. 3.

2.1.3. Microcontroller
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 A microcontroller (PIC18F4550) is used as the brain of the robot. It is a 40-pin dip, consumes low
power and high speed FLASH/EEPROM technology. It consists of 256 bytes EEPROM memory, 35
Input/output, two external clock modes (up to 48MHz), 13 channels of 10-bit analog to digital converter, a
capture/compare/PWM functions. The 16x2 LCD is used for displaying the user output command and status
of the charging battery on the robot.

2.1.4. Wireless communication module

Bluetooth device class-2 USB dongles with a range of 10m and maximum output power as 25mW/4dBm
is used to communicate between microcontroller and computer. Bluestrick on the robot is a Bluetooth Serial
Port Profile device for wireless serial data communications via the Bluetooth radio system. It is a low cost,
compact and easy to use this module. It can connect to the microcontroller via RS232 serial port.

2.1.5. IP wireless camera

The FosCam WPA Wireless IP Dual Audio Camera (FI8908W) is used as an IP wireless camera at
Wireless Standard IEEE 802.11b/g. This camera allows people to get into IP cameras without a huge
investment. The dimension of this camera is 110x100x108millimeters and the net weight is 418gram. It can
pan or tilt at the angle 300°horizontal & 120°Vertical. The IP camera is installed on the robot. It will send
the image in front of the robot to the computer via Ad-hoc mode by Connectify program. The image is
displayed on the computer by IP Camera Tool software.
Table 1: Specification of Garbage Collection Robot

Module Specification
Power supply Battery 12Vdc with charging from solar cell 40W
Power consumption (microcontroller) 5Vdc
Microcontroller PIC18F4550
Programming language C language
Computer Software Visual Basic 6.0
Display LCD
Wheel control DC Motor
Camera IP wireless camera
Communication (Bluetooth and microcontroller) RS232
Communication (PC and robot) Bluetooth
Communication (PC and Camera) Ad-hoc

2.2. Software Implement

The robot controller software is developed in Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 as shown in Fig. 4. It is used
to control the robot by navigation command as shown in Fig. 4, such as forward command (W). Flowcharts
of the robot controller software are shown in Fig. 5. The W, S, A, D and U buttons on the keyboard are used
to be the forward, reverse, left, right, and stop command respectively while the P (up) and L (down) are used
to control the shovel.

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 Fig. 4: The robot controller software

START

Select COM Port

Select Baudrate
START

N N
Set AND Open
Click Connect Button
COM Port
W : Forward
Y R : Reverse
Y A : Left
Y Receive Char (W, S, A, D, P, L, U) D : Right
Press Char (W, S, A, D, P, L, U) Send Char to Bluetooth P : Up
L : Down
N U : Stop
N

(a) computer side (b) microcontroller side

Fig. 5: Flowchart of the robot controller software

3. Results
3.1. IP wireless camera Test

(a) the angle of depression view (b) angle of elevation view

Fig. 6: Image from the IP wireless camera

The IP wireless camera which is installed on the robot is tested by measuring the delay time of
transmitted image. From the results, it was found that the delay time of transmitted image and the sharpness
of the image are depended on the distance between the robot and the user. The delay time of the long path
will be more than on the short path. The distance that the camera can transmit the clearly image is the range
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0 – 15 meters. The delay time of transmitted image is 0.5 and 2 seconds in the range of 15 and 25 meters
respectively.

3.2. Robot Control Test via Bluetooth

In this test, the robot is tested by the user controlling via Bluetooth. All the movement of the robot can be
controlled from the computer through the image from IP wireless camera. The robot can be controlled
within 20 meters that is the limited of Bluetooth, so it can be improved by changing the Bluetooth to be class
1. The robot can move at a constant speed of 0.5m/s and the delay time are the maximum of 2 seconds.
The garbage collection robot was tested at Bangsan Beach, Chonburi, Thailand. The garbage collection
robot can collect the several garbage such as the 1.5 litres plastic bottle, the 0.63 litres glass bottle, the poly
foam box, etc. as shown in Fig. 7.

(a) The large garbage (b) The medium garbage

Fig. 7: The garbage collection test

4. Conclusion
This project developed the robot for collecting the garbage at the beach. Wireless communication
(Bluetooth and Ad-hoc) was applied to the robot for remote controlling. The developed robot can move at
0.5 m/s on the sand. PIC18F4550 was used as the brain for processing all commands. The robot can move
with an average speed of 0.5 m/s on the sand via wireless communication and collect the large garbage with
side 12.5 x 49 cm. This robot is expected to overcome the garbage problem especially on the beach.
However, this robot still be improved to operate automatically and control from the more distance.

5. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kasetsart University Research and Development Institute that support to
complete this project and thank [Link] Mangkornkaew, [Link] Tubsuri, [Link] Aree,
[Link] Petprai and [Link] Jaidee for their help on the experiments.

6. References
[1] Available: [Link]
[Link]. (1-2014)
[2] Available : [Link] (1-2014)
[3] Available: [Link] (1-2014)
[4] Y. Fu-cai et al. Design of Cleaning Robot for Swimming Pools. International Conference on Management Science
and Industrial Engineering (MSIE). 2011, pp. 1175-1178.
[5] T. Takeshita, T. Tomizawa and A. Ohya. A House Cleaning Robot System-Path indication and Position estimation
using ceiling camera. International Joint Conference SICE-ICASE. 2006, pp. 2653-2656.
[6] X. Gao and K. Kikuchi. Study on a Kind of Wall Cleaning Robot. Proc. The 2004 IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Biomimetics. 2004, pp. 391-394.
[7] C.-C. Liu, Y.-P. Kang and S.-N. Yu. Hardware and Software Integration for Domestic Stairs Cleaning Robot. Proc.
of SICE Annual Conference (SICE). 2011, pp. 663-670.
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