Feb 2022 - Jun 2022

  • School of Engineering, EPFL
  • Professor: Auke Ijspeert
  • Supervisor: Alessandro Crespi
  • Coach: Kai Junge

In this project, together with Jianan Mao and Ramy Charfeddine, we designed and implemented a soft-gripper robot to collect PET bottle in various terrains. We used a Raspberry Pi running a object detection model(EfficientDet TensorFlow Lite version) to detect the bottles, a Arduino Mega to control motors, servos and sensors to move to target waypoints without colliding with the obstacles. We won the first place among 4 teams for collecting the most bottles in 10 minutes.

More Info

Report

Background

The interdisciplinary robot competition from the EPFL STI faculty aims at designing, constructing and programming an autonomous cleaning robot able to move in a predefined arena that features obstacles and different terrains. The robot is intended to detect and gather empty PET bottles, which should then be brought to a specific recycling area. This time, the competition has involved four teams of three students with different educational backgrounds. The project being part of the Discovery Learning Program of EPFL, it is a unique opportunity to put into practice the theoretical knowledge acquired, while learning several new skills that are often asked for by employers nowadays: hands-on expertise in several domains (electronics, mechanics, programming…), project management, budget management, interacting with workshops and suppliers, working in a multidisciplinary team.