Trash-Bot

Actually, there is almost no garbage generated here at my house. With my special diet for Diabetes and my high blood pressure I have to eat very controlled meals. that means that it can take over a month to fill a single trash can. I recycle the tin cans and plastic bottles, so I make a trip to the transfer station every three or four weeks to drop them off, and dump the trash can. This way it cost me under a dollar a month to get rid of everything, including cardboard boxes and the bare computer chassis that have been stripped for parts.

I guess that the obesity it often causes can be considered a comnercial succes for the medical industry too !

Commercial success dosn't mean something's automatically *good* !

Graham

I didn't claim that it does. The OP wants to invent something that will be commercially viable and useful to some segment of the population. Who are we to pass judgement on whether it's "good for you?"

BTW, McDonalds does not "cause obesity." PEOPLE overeating and making poor dietetic choices causes obesity. McDonalds never claimed to be a health food store!

From:Pooh Bear snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

Democracy's kinda like that - it doesn't matter how wrong you are, as long as you have a lot of company. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

No, you bigoted euro-id10t. A lot of overweight people had medical problems first. This limits their physical activity. If you simply reduce the calories in the diet, your body thinks you are starving and will digest muscle tissue instead of fat. I had high blood pressure and circulation problems long before I put on any extra weight. I eat as little as I can, and walk as much as i can, but I still have a weight problem. If I eat any less than my prescribed diet I get quite ill and spend a lot of time in bed because I can no longer walk. Read a little about the problem instead of damming an entire nation.

Right, it all has to do with your health status. I consume an estimated

6,000 calories per day and remain on the lean side because I can metabolize that amount and the diet is basically sound nutritionally. If I ate less I would become lethargic and begin storing fat.

So why is obesity so particularly evident in the USA ?

Graham

"Pooh Bear" wrote

After our failed attempt to retake Cuba in the 60's, we embargoed the island and its sugar. Americans were switched to a diet high in "natural" sweeteners made from corn syrup. Some research is beginning to indicate it may not have been a one-to-one replacement for sugar. In fact, high-fructose corn syrup may act more like fat than sugar in the body:

[registration required :-( ]

Fair use snippet: "Fructose is a different story. It "appears to behave more like fat with respect to the hormones involved in body weight regulation," explains Peter Havel, associate professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis. "Fructose doesn't stimulate insulin secretion. It doesn't increase leptin production or suppress production of ghrelin. That suggests that consuming a lot of fructose, like consuming too much fat, could contribute to weight gain." Whether it actually does do this is not known "because the studies have not been conducted," said Havel."

All of this stuff's long-term effects have never really been studied in any detail. Other studies implicate it in a process called "pancreatic burnout."

I'm willing to bet the public cost of consuming corn syrup will dwarf tobacco's. American kids eat it from birth.

-- Bobby G.

Narrowing down the conditions in order to get a firm specification description, I'll go with...

Shape, Base vehicle: I might as well use something like this wagon:

this one with a wood deck But I was thinking along the line of something a bit bigger than those wagons. Perhaps just mounting a box on one of those wagons would work.

However, I can ignore the box vertical dimension in the prototype. The prototype would be just be a flat piece of =BE" plywood 35" x 60" divided into three sections, the 10" front equipment section, the 40" cargo section, and the rear 10" equipment section. The equipment sections would both be 10 inches wide. In other words, the 60" length of the plywood is divided into 10"+40"+10" sections.

Front equipment section: containing the front viewing camera, steering servo and steering mechanism.

Rear equipment section: To the rear of the bed would be the battery and the drive motor & gearbox.

Material: Aluminum; however, plywood would do for a working prototype.

Size:

12 inches high, (but prototype is flat) 35 inches wide overall, by 60 inches in overall length

Path: For simplicity, the bot will drive one-way only on an elliptical track. There will be two parking positions: One will be the primary work station (Home), where it docks with the recharger and is in a position to receive cargo from the household, plastic garbage bags. Coupling with the recharger is inductive. The second parking position (the Curb), would be by the curb where the trash gets picked up. We'll use bags to avoid the problem of the garbage men dealing with cans.

The positioning is controlled by time alone. Most of the time, the bot is at Home. On garbage day, it moves to the Curb, stays there all day, and then returns Home.

Physical Path indicator: In this initial model, we'll paint a white line down the center of the path. The path will be lit by regular photocell-controlled flood lights.

Steering control... .=2E.is accomplished by a video system using a regular UPS-connected camera attached to a computer running Windows XP and some software

It would be nice if everything, the steering mechanism, and the drive mechanism be controlled via USB port connections.

Drive: Only one wheel is motorized for traction. And the speed is very slow, perhaps a couple miles per hour.

Power Everything is operated on a 12 Volt DC system provided by a standard car battery. Recharging is via an inductive coupling at Home.

--=20 (||) Nehmo (||)

You make it sound like everyone in the US os overweight.

I used to be on a 3300 to 3500 calorie a day diet. These days it ranges from 1500 to 1800 calories. Any less and I get so weak I can barely get out of bed. I made a mistake and listened to a VA doctor and TRIED to go on his prescribed 1100 calorie a day diet. It put me in bed for several weeks. I went back to the diet I had worked out for myself and started feeling better. I actually put on over 10 pounds while on the 1100 calorie diet, because I couldn't do anything and my body thought I was starving.

When I finally saw a VA dietitian she looked at my menus, with full details on calories, fat, vitamins and minerals. She looked them over and told me to add a half a glass of orange juice and not to change anything else. She asked where and how I came up with the diet. I told her that I had experimented with different foods to find what made me feel the best, and still met the other requirements. A lot of my favorite foods are now only eaten on one of the two meals a month that I allow myself to eat what I want, and not watch the portions so closely. If I overdo it one one of those meals I can't eat breakfast the next day, and sometimes lunch before I feel hungry. When that happens I eat just enough to take my medication for diabetes and high blood pressure. You can't take them without food in the stomach.

BTW, I have been on International Drive in Orlando quite a few times and from what I saw, we are not the only ones with weight problems. It is an area full of discount and factory outlet stores where there are a lot more foreign tourists than locals. From what I saw, I think that the tour bus company and car rental agencies should have charged them by the pound. It was kind of funny watching someone jabbering in a foreign language while they had a half dozen cameras bouncing off their big gut.

Don't bother. Just automate the can or a carrier. The downside, of course, would be getting the trash guys to leave the damned thing upright so it could return to storage. Somehow robotwars comes to mind with automatic righting devices.

I don't think it'd be all that good an idea to attach the motor/carrier directly to a can. The way they smack around the cans would wreak havoc on any sort of motorized assembly.

Better to leave the cans separate and try to find ways to encourage them being put back into the carrier. If you're dealing with being disabled it might be reasonable to ask the guys on the truck and/or the dispatch office to help a little more than usual. No guarantees, of course, and not all areas have cooperative personnel. But it'd be worth asking.

-Bill Kearney

Since trash cans are ususally tapered a carrier with basketball hoop style rings would only allow the cans to be placed upright.

From:Bill Kearney snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

I don't think it's that hard. Put it on a flat bed small wheel slow moving bot. When the bot gets to position, a jack screw raises one end of the bed, creating a ramp. A push arm slides the can(s) to the ground. The bot goes back to it's loaction at the house, leaving teh cans behind. When empty, the disabled person has a better ability to bring them back him/herself. Alternatively, the bot and the person both go to the empty can, the person loads it on the bot, and the bot rolls it back. Obviously the degree/ type of disability could prevent the problem. But for those who just can't carry a loaded can, some form of mechanized aid similar to what's being discussed may be practical.

What I don't see as viable is leaving the bot "out there" for thieves/vandals enjoyment.

Ed

The can problem could be eliminated if we use bags, which require no returning elements. In fact, if bags alone are the cargo, a dump cart wouldn't be hard to make. In that arrangement, the bot wouldn't have to wait at the curb because the bot is only delivering, that is, driving to the Curb, dumping, and then returning Home.

Patriot P130 platform automatically guided vehicle.

Probably too expensive and too heavy duty, but check the used market. Anyway, that's basically what you need to do the job.

Here's a smaller variant on that theme:

This is a smaller AGV for use in warehouse order-picking.

John Nagle

They don't do this because the trucks are outfitted with a big "robotic" grasper that literally picks the "can" up and dumps it into the truck. And sets it back down, ostensibly in the same place where it picked it up from. (at least here in So. Cal, and probably lots of other places.) Designing/building/implementing something like that that could handle as unpredictable of a load as bags would be prohibitively expensive.

But building a little motorized cart that could carry the can to the curb should be almost trivially easy - just have it follow a wire, or for that matter, a slot! If you get snow, then a snow-blower attachment could be an add-on. ;-) But seriously, this is sounding increasingly simple - a low-profile 4-wheel dolly, with a large wheelbase (for stability), and a reversible motor, like a wheelchair. The technology has been in place for decades, there just hasn't been the volume to get the price down to pennies yet.

And to keep anybody from stealing it, tether it. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

What you need is therapy to release your self-hatred, just like Jim T.

Good Luck! Rich

for further information, please visit

Well, however you do it, don't use a "car" battery. They're optimized for "cold cranking amps", but not for deep discharge. Use wheelchair batteries, golf cart batteries, trailer batteries, boat batteries, any kind of "deep cycle" battery, but _don't_ use a car battery.

I'm curious - is this a one-off for home use, or are you talking about fielding an actual product for market?

Good Luck! Rich

You are correct in that a deep-cycle battery is preferable to a "car" battery, which are optimized for the quick discharge.

. But the demands are low in this situation, so the choice isn't critical. A cheaper 12 V lead-acid battery of almost any type would do.

I chose 12 V because there are plenty of really-available components that work at that voltage.

I basically want to make a working thing, and I'm in the design & engineering phase. I can assess market potential after I have a working prototype. I'm not concentrating on that now. For now, I'm working with the concept that this is a one-off project.