Design and Simulation of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Trash Collection using ROS

Abstract

While it is true that the earth is covered with 70 percentage of water out of which only 3 percentage of it is drinkable in the form of rivers and lakes. However, by releasing sewage and industrial wastes water has become polluted and is undrinkable. The world water Assessment Program estimates that in developing countries, 70 percentage of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply and in a country like india where rivers are considered as sacred waters like Ganga, Yamuna and Godavari are contaminated by bathing and throwing flowers, diyas and plastic waste in the name of worship. Every year an estimated 8 million tonnes of garbage is dumped from somewhere in the region of 600,00 places of worship into rivers. Rejuvenation of these holy bodies has been initiated by indian government in the name of Namami Gange. To aid the process of rejuvenation this paper presents a novel Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) model that cleans the water bodies from floating trash, based on Robot Operating System (ROS) for design, simulation and its control system. The use of Unmanned Surface Vehicles as a tool for inspection, monitoring and exploring of water bodies in lakes and ponds has become a research area of growing interest. However, using real models to test and development of software and their deployment is not feasible due to expensive and complicated parts used in surface vehicles to overcome that, software simulations are used which can replicate real world environments in the simulation world and helps in developing control systems using sensor data. The model has been simulated in a water environment using ros for testing of the control system and movement of the model. Simulation results have shown that the proposed work can be an alternative to collect trash floating on the surface of water with low cost and minimum human intervention.