"Splashy is a penguin shaped robot that helps you in refilling your water bottle"
- Politecnico di Milan, Robotics & Design course, A.Y. 2023/2024
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This project started with the task to create something that would have changed the behavior of people (for the better of course =) ) on campus, given the constrain of non-mobility of such robot. Given such a constrain we explored some ideas before realizing that plastic has been a problem since forever and that the water refillers on campus where not that good. In fact thoose machines were slow resulting in a booring queue during peak hours. This somethimes would result in people buying plastic water bottles from vending machines.
Now i will briefly present some design challenges encoutered during developing of such a project. The full report can be found here
The robot embeds a PIR Sensor able to detect motion. If the robot is not current under usage it will attract people passing by using it's wings (servo motors handles motion) and adjusting it's facial expression(rendered using 8x8 led matrices).
Splashy has a NFC Reader. This nfc can be used to identify users and thus create a rank based on the quantity of recharges that have been made. The rank is presented using an LCD Screen. This creates a gamification aspect in the refilling process
The water can be pumped from a water tank using a pump (like in our case) or alternative the penguin can be directly attached to a pressured faucet by replacing the pump with a electric driven valve
If you plan to recreate this project:
- find all the components used for Splasy here
- find all the 3d-printable in the
stldirectory - give a careful read to the report
- Additionally read user manual and maintence manual
From left to rigth:
- Gianluca Miglietta (Automation Engineer)
- Davide Grazzani (me, Computer Science Engineer)
- Sofia Maria Ciccia (School of Design and Engineering)
- Enrico Virgili (School of Design and Engineering)
Supervisors:
- prof. Andrea Bonarini
- prof. Maximiliano Ernesto Romero