PRE2016 3 Groep5

Group Members

Student ID	Name
0957942	N.S.A. Messaoudi
0958470	J.J.J.B. Verstappen
0955491	C. van Otterlo
0939540	M.J.M. Smits
0956810	naam
09	naam

Presentation

Introduction:

Concise introduction to the project stating the name, group numbers and student names

Current situation:

For years the ocean has accumulated a lot of plastic, trapping it in the sea’s current. This plastic soup has become a danger to the oceans ecosystems and it’s wildlife. It has become a danger for animals because birds can get stuck in the plastic, birds and fish eat the plastic. When it decomposes the fish get contaminated with the various toxic residues. This contaminates the whole food chain as birds, larger fish and humans eat the contaminated sealife. Furthermore some species can get dragged along with the floating garbage and negatively influence new ecosystems in which they get introduced.

Concept idea:

We want to design an autonomous robot to help clean the ocean’s garbage. In order to reach this goal the robot has to have certain functions: First of it has to perceive it’s environment and the plastic contaminating it. It has to know or have the ability to get the plastic out of the water, this includes the waves and current of the ocean it’s cleaning. Once it has retrieved the plastic it has to compress it, store it in safe space aboard the robot and empty the compartment at a designated location when full.

Users:

The technology we want to design will influence the users future by investing in a better environment by cleaning it, preserving the current ecosystems contaminated by the plastic and lastly it helps preventing people from eating contaminated food as mentioned earlier.

Society:

By using the technology society will improve the future by stopping the influence plastic has on the environment. Cleaning the ocean is a start to creating a better society. And lastly it will preserve the current sealife.

Enterprise:

This technology will be a good opportunity for small businesses like startups and also a great investment for bigger companies and foundations as Greenpeace and the WWF.

Challenges:

The biggest challenges in creating a suitable cleaning agent are first of all the fact that it needs to know where it is and where it needs to go. It needs to distinguish plastic content from any other products or wildlife it’s trying to safe, otherwise it would further damage the ecosystem. In order to do the two things mentioned above it needs to take into account the currents and waves so it doesn’t try to clean sections it has already cleaned and because of the current these locations will changes constantly. A big part of the problem is the fact that it needs to be optimized in order to efficient in cleaning. If one has more than one robot, they need to be able to “communicate” to prevent them from doing each other’s work, also this needs separate optimization because of the fact that we’re dealing with multiple entities. And lastly the technology needs to be sustainable and durable itself, because it wouldn’t have a use if it were to pollute the environment more than it is cleaning it.

plan of execution

In this part of the chapter I’m going to define a plan of execution for the chosen project challenge this will include a first explanation of the things we need to execute to reach our goal. Then there will be a definition of tasks, timetable, deliverables, milestones, Gantt chart.

At first we want to analyze how the current situation is and at what scale we can clean up the with plastic polluted ocean. After that we want to analyze what it takes to clean up a part of ocean. That means that we want to follow the path of signals the robot needs from perceiving the plastic up until its motherboard and from its motherboard up until the actuators which executes the action. But also the signals of the environment up until the motherboard which influences the way in which the robot does its actions. When a plastic residue is stuck in coral it needs a different approach then when a plastic bag is drifting on the waves. So the robot has to perceive its environment before perceiving the plastic so that it gathers the plastic as fit for the situation.

After analyzing we want to make steps for obtaining a real sense of how the robot should work. We want to set up a list of how it should do its work by making use of the logic rules we learnt in the Artificial Intelligence part of this course. In this way we can predict how the robot does its perceiving and which actions are connected to the perceived.

After that we would want to try to build a simulation of the AI in the program NETLOGO. This simulation gives a simple model of the reality. We want an AI find all kinds of plastic residues, some which are out in the open and some are more easily gathered. The big difference to the reality is that it is 2-D instead of 3-D, that means that there is no depth difference.