We all hate household chores. Between doing laundry, scrubbing dishes, vacuuming floors, and cleaning toilets, it can feel like there isn’t any time left to relax. So, it is easy to procrastinate — especially when it comes to taking out the trash. You can probably cram a few more things in there before it is truly at capacity, right? Cindy’s boyfriend certainly had that mindset and she was tired of it. That’s why she built this robotic trash can that chases him around until he takes the garbage out.
This robot’s prime directive is to pester Cindy’s boyfriend into sanitary submission, which is a goal that many people in domestic partnerships can understand. It does that in the same way that a puppy might beg for attention. When the trash can is full, it begins roaming around the home in search of a person. When it finds someone (Cindy’s boyfriend or anyone else) it locks onto the target and starts following them, making passive aggressive comments about its current sad and smelly state. Ideally, the boyfriend will acquiesce and take the trash bag out to the dumpster, rather than endure the shame and annoyance.
Cindy built this as a mobile robotic base for the trash can the couple already owns. It has four Mecanum wheels, each with its own DC gearmotor, so it can move in any which way — even side-to-side, like a graceful crab. Those wheels attach to a simple frame made of hardened steel rods and 3D-printed brackets.
The robot operates under the control of an Arduino Mega 2560 development board and has four sets of sensors for navigation. On each side of the robot’s shoebox enclosure, there is an ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection and a PIR (Passive InfraRed) sensor for people detection. There is also an ultrasonic sensor on each corner to further enhance object detection.
To determine when the trash can is full, the robot has an infrared sensor mounted near the top. When that trips, the robot beings playing pre-recorded messages through a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player. If Cindy ever wants to upgrade from passive aggressive messages to regular aggressive messages, she can simply swap out the files on the SD card.
It doesn’t work perfectly. For example, infrared reflections confuse the PIR sensor and cause the robot to chase shiny appliances such as the oven. But we’re still going to call this a “win” for annoyed romantic partners around the world.
