Autonomous Recycling Robot

This was my first robot since the days of Lego Mindstorms 1.0. It was built as my senior design project. It follows all the rules to the IEEE SouthEastCon 2009 hardware competition. It would have easily won, had it had the chance to compete.

It is built from the ground up, starting with the guts of a Irobot Create. I was in charge of all the electronics, as well as a good portion of the programming.

It autonomously navigates and finds objects using a scanning Sharp IR behind the main scoop. There are 5 IR reflectance sensors in the scoop that measure the height of the objects it collects. Then, the three different types of objects are sorted and stored on the robot.  It travels with a random walk if no objects are scanned, and is bounded in the playing field by a electric fence detected by a sensor that I designed and built.