The Idea

Catherine was a bad recycler. So bad, in fact, that her roommate once sent her a series of emails reminding her to sort plastics from paper and metal from glass. Catherine tried, but couldn't get in the swing of it.

So Catherine and Linda combined powers to build a robot that would eliminate the problem.

v. 1

The original idea was to have a large robot with a cover, a chute, a main ledge, and three motorized gates that would open to the correct bin. It would look like this:

However, we quickly realized that we would have problems....

- Constructing the gates. How would we make them strong enough? Able to go both up and down? Where would all these motors go? Would they be wide enough?

- Housing everything inside a trash can-like container would take the fun out of it. Exhibit visitors want to see how things work, not a black box.

- The size of the bins below would restrict the portability and adaptability of the robot. We wanted to make the robot work in as many conditions as possible with little fuss.

v. 2

On Lyn's advice, we designed a robot that could move across a table and drop things in bins. This got rid of our gate problem, since now we only need one. We also could make it work with any-size bins at any distance apart.

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Created by: Linda Fung and Catherine Lee
January 2007
Background image from: www.lancashire.gov.uk/
Background music from: Captain Planet