PETCat

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  Frame design 2

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  Frame design 1

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  Frame design 3

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  Modular, slide-fit filtering bag

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  Propulsion system

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  Rendering of our Robot

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  Large plastic collection cage

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  Modular Attachment for filtering substrate

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  Rendering of our Robot

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  Rendering of our Robot

Inspiration:

Cleaning up plastic is a key goal for any organization catered towards solving sustainability issues. With the world's plastic consumption only expected to increase, the costs associated with cleaning it will increase, and its environmental impacts will increase. We, as a group, are interested in working with designing and developing a vehicle solution to this problem, which lead us to designing PETCAT.

What it does

Our ROV is a modular robot that will work in a team to cleanup microplastic pollution. With a brush intended to stir up plastic from the seafloor for collection, but also the ability to skim the

How we built it

We built our robot out of the material that we are collecting – PET Plastic. This idea plays into the core role of our company and our objectives we had when designing the robot.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many issues involving the CADing process and the overall design of our robot. With such a complex vehicle, there are many tricky issues to troubleshoot, especially with the focus on modularity that we have. On a more fundamental level, developing an understanding of the project area and picking the problem was a far trickier question. With sustainability being such a broad term, making a project of substance but also with meaningful impact is tricky, as we had to find our own niche in between the web of government entities and existing private corporations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the overall quality of our CAD model and the depth of our business presentation. We believe we undertook a standard startup development model and backed it up by proof of concept and strong statistics. The validation behind our product is strong and our design matches this validation and solves the problem we hoped to.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the plastic pollution problem, specifically with regards to microplastics. When it comes to technical skills, we were able to apply and grow our SolidWorks and CADing skills, and obtained a much higher understanding of how to use SolidWorks. By building a vehicle chassis, we also better understand the components of what goes into developing the skeleton of a vehicle.

What's next for PetCat

We hope to set up an initial location near a coastal area, reach out to local governments, and involve ourselves in the local ecosystem. We want to grow our reach within communities to encourage efforts to clean up plastic pollution and encourage government adoption of our technology.

Built With

• matlab
• powerpoint
• solidworks