Williamston High School InvenTeam Blog #1

Williamston High School Inventeam Blog #1- December 1st, 2019

Greetings and Salutations to all of our readers! We are the Williamston High School InvenTeam, one of the teams chosen to receive the Lemelson-MIT grant this year and we are incredibly grateful to be a part of this process. Members of the team are: Faith Schafer (administrative lead), Allyson Suandi (communications lead), Amanda Jaworsky (research lead), Gabe Lounsbury (sustainability lead), Owen Gulick (technical lead), Jack Schafer (technical lead), Katelyn Kersten (financial lead), Emmett Fountain (programming lead), Noah Palmatier (engineering team member), Cam Denk (engineering team member), Will Bellinger (engineering team member), Ethan Egger (engineering team member), Trucy Phan (PR team member), Nick Rubeck (engineering and PR team member), and our lovely advisors: Joe Rasmus and Steve Kersten.

Our team’s mission is to create an autonomous beach cleaning device that will remove small pieces of plastic that are often missed by other beach cleaning methods. It will identify and collect the plastics which will then be filtered through a system that will separate the plastic from the sand and other natural pieces of the environment in order to ensure that we will not disturb the natural environment surrounding the beaches.
In June, our team will be flying to Washington, D.C. to attend a conference called EurekaFest. Hosted by the Lemelson-MIT Program, this event will afford us the opportunity to present our prototype, engage in fun activities with students who have similar interests, and get advice from experts in engineering and invention. We will use the Lemelson-MIT Program’s grant money to develop, build and finalize our invention. In order for our entire team to be able to attend EurekaFest, the Williamston High School InvenTeam needs your help. Tax-deductible donations can be made to “InvenTeams” via the Williamston Schools Foundation (P.O. Box 70, Williamston, MI 48895). Your support is greatly appreciated!

News Update: Fox47 News article
After being announced by Lemelson-MIT at the end of October, our local Fox47 news also announced our high school being chosen which we have displayed on our social media pages @williamstoninventeam on Instagram and our Facebook page Williamston High School Inventeam. Here is a link to the article below!
https://www.fox47news.com/news/local-news/williamston-high-school-students-receive-invention-grant
We have also recently been invited to be on the School Rules segment on Fox47 and will be filming on January 15th!

Team Fundraising!
P/T conferences
It is very important to our team to reach out to our community and gain their support of our invention so on November 5th during Parent/Teacher conferences the team ran a booth in order to do this. We got the opportunity to talk about our mission and receiving the grant while doing some community outreach. We also talked about our EurekaFest trip and the opportunity to present at the Smithsonian in June. We ended up fundraising a total of $186.10!

Donation Letters
For more fundraising, each member of the team sent out twenty solicitation letters to friends and family that explained what InvenTeams® is, what our team was creating, and about EurekaFest. We also sent letters out to corporations and are hoping to get some corporate sponsors as well. Through this corporate sponsorship, we have different levels of memberships based on how much the corporation donates. The platinum membership is when corporations donate $500 where a picture of our team in front of the corporation will be posted on all of our social media pages. The silver membership is when corporations donate $1000 where they receive what the platinum membership gets and they receive a bonus tshirt with the name of their corporation on the back. The gold membership is when corporations donate $1500 where they receive what the silver membership gets, a banner that will be displayed at our Mid-Grant Review, and a sticker on our autonomous beach cleaning device.

 

Save the Date: Panera Fundraiser, Rotary Club presentation, and Light Parade Coming Soon
We have another couple fundraising events that the team has planned for December. We are going to be on a float at our town’s light parade and are passing out goodie bags filled with candy, our promotional flyer, and a donation card on December 7th. On December 9th, from 4-8pm at the Panera Bread in Okemos, MI, members of the community can show a flyer and 50% of the proceeds will go to the team! The team will also be presenting at the Williamston Rotary Club about our device on December 17th! This will be our team’s first ever formal presentation.

Updates From The Management Team About Team Progress

Communications
We have officially launched our Instagram and Facebook pages. Our Instagram is @williamstoninventeam https://www.instagram.com/williamstoninventeam and our Facebook page is Williamston High School InvenTeam https://www.facebook.com/Williamston-High-School-InvenTeam-101809691299443/ where you will hear about the team’s progress, updates on events that we are doing, behind the scenes footage, fundraising that we are doing, and ways that you can help the team! The communications lead has also been filming a fun vlog of some behind the scenes action and a monthly recap of what the team has accomplished so far!

 

Identification/Programming

We have made significant progress in identifying target plastics and trash, despite a few setbacks and delays. The original plan was to use computer vision to locate plastics on the beach so that they can be targeted. Fairly early on in the process we had created a program capable of separating possible plastics from sand, however, there was some inaccuracy unless a variable was fine-tuned in the program. The current working solution is to make a very stripped down convolutional neural network that can determine a working value in close to real time so that the heavy processing can be done more accurately and more efficiently. Testing the program required a varied sample set of images so a group took sample pictures from a nearby beach. Most of this was done before we had access to a Raspberry Pi, the chosen control method for this project, and the proper cameras and some time was spent waiting for access to them. Now that we have access to these resources, we are working on getting the Raspberry Pi properly set up with the cameras and implementing the program in near real-time, just as it will hopefully implemented in our prototype.

Technical
The engineering team had experimented on which method of retrieval the team was going to go with in order to pick up the plastic pollution. We narrowed it down to two methods- by using a mechanism similar to a Shop-Vac or large brushes. We decided to purchase a Shop-Vac top that attaches to a bucket from Lowe’s and some large brushes and put both to the test to see which one most efficiently picked up the small pieces of plastic. We made a makeshift sand box using tarp and poured sand all over it and used some pieces of plastic we gathered from a sample that we made during our Grand Haven trip in April and sprinkled it around the tarp sandbox. We then tested the method of retrieval using the vacuum and found that it easily sucked up the pieces of plastic However, it did pick up a portion of sand. he team decided that we should not use the brush method because the system may be too large and too difficult to use and the vacuum is much simpler. We have now started to fix the sand issue by putting a screen in the vacuum to let the sand pass through but keep the plastic on the top. Members of the engineering team have been hard at work, coming in every morning and afternoon to work on the project and some members have an independent study at school where they spend their time working on the project as well. We have also had a build day on November 27th from 9AM-4PM to work on the device as an entire team.

Sustainability

Our device’s sustainability will be a crucial factor for the success and performance. This being said, it is crucial that our robot be able to run over a long period of time and run successfully. This factor of energy consumption has greatly played into the robot we plan on designing. Our first major task has been deciding what we will do to retrieve plastics from the sand of the beaches. Sustainability has played a serious role in this decision, since the device must be able to travel the distance of a beach and back entirely under battery power. Our plan is to also add solar panels to the upper part of the robot so that it may be able to run under more of its own power. With the sunlight received on a beach, we feel this will be a great contributor to the robots sustainability.

Finance
Financially, the team has created tax exempt accounts for Amazon and Adafruit in order to be able to purchase everything. So far, we have purchased many things such as the large brushes and the vacuums that are our potential options for using as our method of retrieving the plastic. We also bought many items for the for the programming team as well, including some Raspberry Pi 3’s and USB cameras. The team has been hard at work at fundraising at Parent/Teacher conferences, solicitation letters, and with future fundraisers such as Panera Bread. During parent teacher conferences we raised $183.10 and our solicitation letters were sent out on November 26th so hopefully we get a good return on these.

Research
Our research lead has been taking the IRB members research classes and has learned how research gets approved, who approves it, and how they regulate it and has learned lots of vital information that she will be using in the future!

Administrative
Our administrative lead has been hard at work setting up the Panera Bread fundraiser and wrote a grant in conjunction with our research and financial leads for the Williamston Schools Foundation which will hopefully go through! We are also planning for the rotary presentation on December 17th!