Electronically assisted automatic waste segregation

Abstract

Increasing urbanization has led to a major waste management crisis with the proliferation of improperly planned structures having no proper facility to collect, segregate and process waste. Domestic waste has increasing chemical and plastic content. These chemicals do not perish unless treated properly. The treatment also necessitates timely collection, segregation and if possible decomposition, reuse or recycling. Human intervention has been the most popular way to segregate waste, but when it comes to working with a mixture of wastes, it puts their health and hygiene at stake. It is always better to treat waste through the help of robots which can handle waste in any hazardous environment. An automated waste collection and segregation system based on a robotic assembly and machine learning based classification is developed. A robotic arm with a distance sensor will pick up the waste and place it on a binary classifier platform which has a camera attached to capture the image and an algorithm to classify the waste as biodegradable or non-biodegradable into their respective bins.