Autonomous Floating Garbage Collection Device using Computer Vision and Robotics

This paper presents an autonomous garbage collection device, which uses computer vision and robotics to clean the floating waste in the local water bodies. The tedious and increasingly repetitive task of garbage collection is becoming a major problem worldwide, our device uses ESP32-CAM and Arduino UNO to automate this task, images of water bodies are streamed through the ESP32-CAM which is then analysed by python program on the local server created by the ESP32-CAM. Arduino UNO processes the algorithm for autonomous motion of the device, currently the algorithm used is very basic, just enough to be able to make the device move autonomously, there is scope to improve the autonomous movement algorithm. we have also added an ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection so that devices motion is not interrupted by obstacles, for garbage detection we have used YOLO-V3 algorithm which is chosen for it fast performance [5], overall we the result of our testing showed that the device is very capable of collecting floating water waste and can be deployed in local water bodies for garbage collection although there are various areas where the device can be improved one of them being use of advanced microcontroller board for local processing of images.