PET bottle collecting robot

While at university, two friends and I registered as a team for the EPFL robots competition. The objective of the competition is to build a robot that would collect PET bottles inside an arena and bring them back to a collection area. We figured the robot would need to be designed with a storage space as well as some form of path finding algorithm if we wanted it to be able to carry bottles to the collection area so decided to simply skip the step. Instead, we designed the robot as a bottle cannon that would shoot the bottles in the collection area.

Basically, the whole robot is constructed around the cannon: a PVC tube with fast spinning rubber wheels throwing bottles that go through it. Bottles are being collected at the front of the robot by a set of rotating brushes. Additionally, a set of obstacle sensors are mounted at the front of the robot for navigation.