Other ideas which we considered included:
Robot for beach litter removal
Beach debris can degrade rapidly to produce microplastics when exposed to hot and dry conditions. Such microplastics are harmful when ingested by plankton, other marine wildlife and us! Hence, we did think of creating a robot that would be able to recognise and collect beach debris to alleviate this issue.
However, we were advised against using computer vision (for the robot to autonomously recognise litter) as it would not be feasible given the timeline of the project and our skillsets.
Mechanism to clear floating litter from moving water channels
There is quite a lot of litter in our water channels which can lead to clogging of drainage gratings and congestion. Moreover, they would eventually end up in the oceans and result in pollution. Hence, Shane thought of a mechanism to autonomously and continuously remove debris from the channel. Here’s the concept of his idea!
Alas, there are many things to consider such as shape, size & mass of debris, disposal and storage, power source, as well as varying sizes & shapes of channels around Singapore. Moreover, manpower would be still be needed to remove potential blockages if this solution was not in place.
Self mural painter
Several robots that automatically paint walls one uniform colour exist in the market. Click this link to watch a video of a wall-painting autonomous robot!
However, there are no robots that can paint more precise designs/murals on walls. Hence, our idea was to create an autonomous robot that could paint murals on walls, based on any images that users upload to the robot. Our initial idea involved the robot/a software taking the pixels of the images and converting them into coordinates, and subsequently, the robot would colour in each coordinate accordingly. However, this would involve converting the images into much lower resolution ones with larger pictures as a base map for the mural.
We realised that this project would be rather complex with issues relating to the resolution of the design painted by the robot, as well as the robot getting the precise colours based on the image uploaded. We were also advised to consider the height and scale of the wall that the robot can paint since stability was an issue. Furthermore, the viscosity and thickness of paint needed to be considered as well (which we had overlooked) as that would affect the mechanics behind the compressor and pump system to spray the paint.