Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2026 Owen Hoffman, Ryder Maston, and Jack Nicholson. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Engineering Department, Computer Science Department

First Advisor

Sintana E. Vergara

Second Advisor

Keith O'Hara

Abstract

Trash Bot! is the prototype of a smart and mobile waste receptacle for Swarthmore’s waste management system. With Swarthmore College committing to embed zero waste into campus culture and achieve a 90% diversion rate by 2035, flexible waste systems must be developed and improved. Trash Bot! seeks to improve the diversion rate and sort accuracy on campus by reducing the human error present in the current waste sorting process. Trash Bot! was also designed to seamlessly integrate with a classroom environment, maintaining safety standards and avoiding collisions. Trash Bot! uses computer vision coupled with a trained classifier algorithm to achieve a sort accuracy upwards of 80%, a significant improvement over current estimates. In addition, the project encourages students to engage with their waste process by approaching students and prompting them to classify their waste properly. The project advances our understanding of how robotics can operate in a municipal setting without disrupting the flow of the space. Design of the robot began with a Turtlebot Chassis chosen to carry a Raspberry Pi computer and Arduino micro-controller. Software was developed for the computer-vision, classifier and object detection models, as well as the control algorithm for movement of the robot. Finally, the robot was constructed, finetuned, and evaluated for performance. The project was completed with a final budget of $976.04 as detailed in the Appendix.

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