Background & Motivation

The Tray Return Campaign has been going on for the past few years, aiming to promote improved hygiene and cleanliness in food centres across Singapore. From 1 June 2021 onwards, tray return would be mandatory instead, and failure to do so would result in written warnings and subsequent fines of up to $2000.

The act of returning one’s tray is simple, but many Singaporeans have yet to cultivate a habit of doing so. In the age of increased digitalisation and mechanisation, tray return robots have been deployed at a few food courts to aid the tray return process.

We feel that this is a good solution due to various reasons. Firstly, we improve the convenience of returning trays, and diners would not have to walk over to the tray return station. This is especially useful for diners who have limited mobility or elderly diners. For larger food courts, there may be relatively lesser tray return stations, and having tray return robots would allow the diners to return their trays without walking a far distance to find the return stations. Next, these robots also aim to reduce the cleaners’ workload, and they can focus on the cleanliness of other areas of the food court. Lastly, by increasing the efficiency of clearing food leftovers, these robots would increase the hygiene standards of the food courts and reduce the number of pests.

However, the original tray return robots has some limitations that we would like to address.

Limitations

1. Errors in Navigation: Current robots do not follow a fixed route, thus may get stuck when running into each other.

2. Requires manual clearing of trays from the robot: Robots are unable to roam and collect more trays after getting full, waiting on cleaners to clear them before continuing. This is inefficient, particularly during peak periods.

3. Bad smell: As the current robots only return to the main station once they have a full load, they may roam for too long, causing the food to start to smell.

Our improvements

1. Line tracking for navigation (or magnetic tracking)

2. Automated unloading system to remove the need for manual unloading

3. Weight sensor to trigger return to main station, and time limit for roaming