SWIng - Smart Waste Ingolstadt

Links to Videos:

Motivation

Don’t we all want to feel at home in our city? Isn’t being comfortable and feeling at ease one of the best things about being at home? And being in a clean environment is a big part of creating such a comfortable surrounding. Many cities are full of dirt and trash and we simply step over it. We don’t think it is our responsibility to take care of other people’s refuse. But our environment is one of the most important assets we have. And in our opinion everyone should put more focus on our surroundings and we are all responsible for our quality of living. We are all a part of the community we live in.

It is our goal to make it easier to keep our cities clean! It is our vision to engage every single one of you to join our movement and make cleansing the community’s responsibility, more attractive and a lot more fun. We provide cities with a network of smart bins and allow social interaction to become a big motivation in cleaning our cities. By being a part of SWIng, you help the environment, the city administration, and every single citizen.

Make it smart, make it clean, make it social!

Our Idea

We equip trash bins around the city with sensors and a computational unit to make them smart. This way bins can be connected to a network and help the city recognise full bins, schedule garbage collection smartly, and interact with its users. An infrared signal located near the upper edge of the bin recognises when a pedestrian recycles something and sends a signal to their phone or watch. After identifying themselves, the user gets bonus points for recycling. This will lead to a bigger willingness of recycling in public places and make it fun. Authentication works either via NFC (Near Field Communication) or by scanning a QR-code similar unique identifier that only appears on a display when the trash bin has recognised getting new input. This proves that the user actually recycling something. The bonus points are then added to the user’s Google account and can be shared with friends. This way you can see how many points your friends have already collected and be proud of your achievements. If a pedestrian recycles something someone else has lost, he or she gets rewarded with even more points than if it was his or her own trash. We don’t want to motivate people to produce more garbage, but we want to make keeping the city clean and actively cleaning the city more attractive and with more fun. That’s why a garbage can only accept one piece of trash from one person within the same two minutes and why a person can only collect points seven times a day.

Furthermore, smart bins can help the city administration to keep an overview of the garbage bins and how full they are. This can lead to more flexibility, smarter garbage collection and a reduction of costs.

Because bins are getting smart, they can also be found more easily. Every location can be stored in a database and allow the user to get directions to the nearest garbage bin. Google Assistant can hereby function as the communication interface between the user and the navigation to the next bin. We can also store what kind of garbage can be recycled in a certain bin. This way the user can even ask specifically to find the nearest place for recycling plastic.

How we built it

We equipped a Raspberry Pi with an infrared sensor and a display that can be integrated into a garbage bin. A display is not necessary if identification technologies like NFC are used to authenticate the user. But it can be very useful for users without NFC on their phones or as a backup option. We can use Google Lens to read the QR-code and instantly connect to Google Assistant to help the user navigate through the recycling process.

All smart garbage bins can be stored in a database holding a unique ID, their location, a variable that indicates whether the bin is full and what kind of garbage can be recycled here. A Python script that gets input values of the user’s current location can calculate the nearest bin based on the Euclidean Norm. This location can then be forwarded to a navigation system that leads the user to the desired destination.

Google Assistant can be accessed via voice to help with finding the nearest bin, to walk through the process of getting bonus points, to get one’s current score and friends’ scores.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges during the 48 hours of Hackadon. First of all, we struggled with the Raspberry Pi and its sensors, which were poorly documented and difficult to integrate.

What we learned

So much! It was our first Hackathon so we had a lot of learning potential.

SWInging into the future

Basically, we see the Hackadon as a starting point for a great and manifold idea. The journey started within the last 48 hours. First, we designed the idea itself, as you can see written above. The next evolution steps are described more in detail.

Step 1

It is addressed to all people with an already existing "green behaviour", We will strengthen the motivation for recycling foreign waste in conjunction with the combination of smart devices (google assistant) and a social network. The challenge we have to solve here is a seamless integration of the user experience.

Step 2

Our so-called business model. As a primary interest, we have the big idea of changing the behaviour of the people. Nevertheless, we also are up to generate a business model for having earnings. Currently, we see three big customers in the B2B sector: Waste management companies; Township and Power authorities. Waste management companies could optimize their cycle of pick up - and in addition to that, they can also align their navigation of the garbage collection trucks. If the smart bins are full way faster than in the normal cycle of e.g. two weeks, they can get in contact with the customers to ask for an additional clearance. For generating money where it could be a pay-by-information fee or a flat rate (e.g. xy € per month for z smart bins). Township can also benefit from this system - in our opinion the most in isolated areas, where the city service is not each day (e.g. the Baggersee Ingolstadt). In conjunction with the smart bins, you are in the position to take a longer journey just if needed. A second benefit for the city is a monitoring of illegal waste disposal. If a bin is in a normal area (e.g. Viktualienmarkt) but each day full within some minutes by night, it could be a hind for illegal waste disposal. For the city, we see that they could do the investment in the Hardware. A group of business most people don't think are the power authorities in conjunction with waste and bins. In Ingolstadt there is a waste incineration plant. So if there is a high demand for energy and it could not be covered by renewable energy techniques it could be a very efficient solution to catch the half-full bins ahead of a big event (e.g. Volksfest) to cover the power demand.

Step 3

We will conquer private households and companies. In the previous steps, the idea and the basis were just focused on public waste and bins. With the extension to the private household and big companies, all the assumptions are valid anymore but the target group and the amount of bins are way higher. In correlation to that also the amount of waste which could be recycled smart and the money you can make.

Overall we see that the people are getting a more and more "green mindset" and also the waste industry is a key component for corporate responsibility and efficient resource management.

Current State

Challenges	Current State	Further Work
Raspberry Pi and infrared sensors	running	connect to cloud
NFC Identification	NFC works	sending identification to cloud
Navigation	getting location of nearest bin	starting navigation app
Interface Communication	no communication yet	save data in cloud, access it with Google Assistant
Social Network	not implemented yet	connect to Google Account and allow collection of points
Display output	terminal on Raspberry Pi	Show pretty screen
Infrared Sensor	detects trash	maybe get more than one for more accurate detection