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	W.J.P. Goudriaan
0953119	J.I.A. Spapen

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 can be used by the government to clean up the ocean and may be sponsored by 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.

Context:

Problem: In the ocean there are parts that have a high concentrated amount of plastic in it. This is called the plastic soup. This plastic soup covers a huge amount of the sea and the estimates are between 700.000 till 15.000.000 square kilometers. And this number is growing in numbers every day, from which a huge amount of the plastic comes from the land. The goal of course is to get rid of this huge pile of plastic garbage. It is already a huge task to clean the plastic that is already in the sea, however it is also very important that this pile doesn’t get any bigger.

Solution:

To make sure that the plastic soup pile doesn’t get any bigger, our goal is to design an AI robot that can patrol areas ( the coast of beaches, or places where a lot of plastic garbage is put in the sea) and that clean up these areas. There will be platforms/boats in the sea and around those platform there will be robots patrolling the sea.

Execution of this idea:

We came up already with some ideas for a solution to this problem.

Solution 1, a drone:

A drone for house usage now can fly for about 25 minutes with a top speed of around 80 kilometers per hour. However they are making a new drone that can stay in the air for around 60 minutes and with a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour. It can also carry up to 5kg in weight. If the drone has to be able to fly to a place and back again then it’s maximum range is 40 km. this is of course in theory and in real life it will probably be a bit less and it has to be taken into account that it has to pick up plastic garbage. This has to be implemented in a script. The amount of kilometers it can fly, how far it is away from the platform/boat and if it can still come back to refuel.

Solution 2, a floating:

This will have a sort of same execution as the drone, however it is also a different. A floating robot might be able to hold up a lot more weight. A compressing chamber can be build in so that it doesn’t have to go back to a place to put the plastic every time it comes across a plastic garbage unit. It is also more realistic to use this option, if we plan to actually go to the plastic soup and instead of preventing it from getting bigger, making it smaller.

Assumption:

Some assumptions have to be made before there can be any calculating and investigating the project.

Solution 1:

1. The drone it’s lifetime is 60 minutes. 2. It can fly with a maximum of 100 km/h. 3. It takes 30 seconds to pick up a unit of plastic garbage. 4. Whenever the drone picks up a unit of plastic garbage, it will bring it to the closest platform. 5. There will be enough platforms in the sea, so that the drone is at all times at a maximum distance of 5 km of the platform. 6. A drone has to stay at least 100 meters away from a person/boat.

Solution 2:

1. The boat has a lifetime is dependent of the motor and the amount of fuel it will hold. 2. The speed is dependent of the length of the boat. 3. It takes 30 seconds to pick up a unit of plastic garbage. 4. When it takes a unit of plastic garbage it will put it in a compression chamber and compress it. 5. When the compression chamber is full then it will go back to a designated location to empty the chamber.

Interested buyers:

The government is probably interested in this technology. It is a way to keep the environment clean. Not only the plastic soup will get cleaner but also the beaches will not have plastic garbage on it. Which results in cleaner beaches and it’s less dangerous for people going to the beach and children playing on it.

Milestones

Given the sheer size of the plastic soup, stated in the chapter context, cleaning it up will be a difficult time-consuming process. So there are some milestones that have to be set, so the progress can be somewhat measured. Basically those milestones are intermediate objectives we set for ourselves, in order to keep the project realistic in the given time.

The ultimate goal is obviously to clean up the whole plastic soup which currently floats in the oceans, as fast as possible. Another goal is to solve the problem at the source, plastic getting thrown in the oceans. Together these objectives form the basis of the project, but later on in the process it is very well possible more milestones will be added.

Starting with the first milestone, removing plastic from the oceans. Since the plastic soup is approximately between 700.000 and 15.000.000 square kilometres big it will take years to clean it up entirely. Another problem is that there isn’t just one soup, there are multiple soups located on different parts of the earth. According to Boyan Slats it would take less than 5 years to clean up one gyre. A gyre is a circular ocean current located in the big oceans, there are the 5 major gyres. So with only one cleaning system it would still take over two decades to clean up the plastic, so this would be a realistic milestone timewise.

Another import issue is the definition of a clean ocean. The soup isn’t necessarily visible plastic, it is also the for a part micro plastics. After a period of time a part of the plastic breaks down into micro plastics, those micro plastics end up in the food chain. As a consequence water gets a certain amount of micro parts plastic per cubic meter. We don’t think it is a realistic milestone to purify the water to that extend, so we will define clean as all the visible plastic removed.

Those were the main milestones for the cleaning part of the project. But to solve a problem one has to start at the source. In this case the plastic being thrown in the oceans. This problem can be tackled in two ways, a legal prohibition or a clean-up service right at the shores. A combination of those will probably work best. Since approximately 80% of the plastic ends up in the soup comes from the shores, the rest is due to the sea-industry. So there is definitely room for improvement on that area. The ultimate goal with our platform solution (see chapter context) is to make the coast plastic free, so the soup won’t grow any bigger than it already is.