AUTONOMOUS Waterway Drone & Docking Station
SENIOR DESIGN CAPSTONE PROJECT | 2020
This Senior Design Capstone project seeks to address water pollution in local rivers, lakes, and wetlands. This drone and docking system is a resiliency application that can be deployed in any waterway location around the world. During the era of the Anthropocene, the world's rapidly growing population must take strides in preserving ecosystems that begin in waterways. With the emerging impacts of climate change on local governments, many are making strides to improve their environmental footprint. Thus policymakers are innovating new decision-making processes that embrace the development of new technologies to models of action and policy around. The cleaning technology implemented in lakes, ponds, and rivers across the country can aid in cleaning waterways and improving ecosystems.
THE objective
This autonomous cleaning drone and docking system will collect contaminates from waterways and depose them into an automated docking system. The drone aims to aid in severe waterway pollution in order to restore and protect fragile ecosystems biodiversity, water quality, and climate change resilience across the world. This project investigates existing drone cleaning concepts, product design, additive manufacturing, mechanical design, analysis and simulation, robotics, climate change, and sustainability in order to develop a fully integrative system. The full system includes several subsystems including a lifting mechanism, tilting mechanism, automated sliding door, charging application, trash bin, and drone that work synchronistically to restore waterways. Throughout this research, the team investigates the best design approaches and applications to develop an easily modular and deployable system.
THE TEAM
The team consists of senior engineering students from Wentworth Institute of Technology.
PRODUCT IDEATION
TEAM MEETINGS
The team meets 2-3 times per week to work on the project. Below are some time lapse videos from the team meetings.
DESIGN process VIDEO
Final Presentation
PRODUCT DESIGN
Here is the final Concept rendering.
