Learning from the field

In the spring of this year, students enrolled in Plymouth State University’s (PSU’s) industrial robotics course embarked on a multisemester project to bring new life to a pair of pest control robots owned by Casella Waste Systems.

Casella, based in Rutland, Vermont, has used six of these robots for the past four years to ward off wildlife at its Bethlehem, New Hampshire, landfill. However, maintenance has lagged, and it’s been about two years since the machines worked properly.

Bret Kulakovich, an adjunct professor at New Hampshire’s PSU who oversees the robotics lab, first learned of the robots from PSU alum and Cardinal Consulting LLC founder Nathan Karol and thought they were good prospects for rehabilitation.

Karol helped initiate conversations with Casella, leading to its partnership with PSU’s robotics program.

The project aims to bring the robots, which mainly use obsolete systems, back into working condition. The solar-powered, stationary robots were used to detect the movement of wildlife, specifically birds, and to agitate and scare them away from the landfill.

“[The robots] had begun to fall into disrepair; the machines were almost 10 years old,” Kulakovich says.

Because the robot’s manufacturer was based in Canada, he says Casella had to transport the machines back and forth for maintenance. The manufacturer later went out of business, making maintenance more difficult, and Casella lost access to the Amazon Web Services platform hosting the code needed to operate the robots.

Determining the damage

Students received the robots midway through the spring semester and immediately began work to assess damage and determine each component’s function.

“This is a from-the-ground-up assessment,” Kulakovich says. “We have two units on-site that Casella delivered: One we have completely disassembled and stripped down to the bolts, and the other we have tested as thoroughly as the first but without disassembling everything.”

By having one unit that remains intact, he says students have a point of reference for the machine’s interior components and control system.

The robots’ heads are equipped with cameras and motion sensors and swivel 180 degrees. The robots also have loudspeakers that emit predator noises, propane-fueled air cannons to scare large mammals and lasers that create a strobing effect.

As work began on the units, students faced some challenges. Kulakovich says many of the parts were manufactured overseas between 2008 and 2010, wires were not labeled and operating system menus were in Chinese and French.

Further investigation also uncovered cracked housings and broken fans on some of the lasers, leading to excessive heat and the possibility of failing.

“In a lot of ways, we have to approach this like detectives,” PSU robotics major Jake Reichenthal says in a news release announcing the project. “There’s no instruction manual for these robots. We’ve had to figure out how to translate other languages, scour the internet for obscure components and try to deduce what various ports on strange circuit boards are meant to do. But we are learning something new about it every day.”

To understand the circuit board controlling the robot, students had to find the units’ manufacturer by using Google image searches.

Eventually, they found similar parts from a manufacturer selling through the e-commerce site Ali Express, but the details were in Hebrew.

Kulakovich tells Valley News that the listing had the appearance of the part, so the team searched for the name of the manufacturer and part number. This led to some pages scanned in from a manual.

Photo courtesy of Plymouth State University

Updating the technology

With their newfound knowledge about the robots, students then worked to present Casella with a scalable solution, largely based on the decision whether to repair the machines or redesign them completely.

Because of their age, as well as advancement in technology since the units were built, Kulakovich says the department has begun looking into a full rebuild.

“We want to incorporate those [advancements]; we have a capability here at PSU to do our own modeling and do our own libraries and train these things for specific environments and make them more adaptable,” he says. “Going in and making the [units] work would be a lot more daunting than working from scratch.”

As the team moves forward with the rebuilds, it first needs to decide on a couple of different software packages and how the robots will react to their environment.

“We’re building our own library models for the vision recognition system to use that would be based predominately on what we would find in regions of the New Hampshire area and be able to better focus the response of the robot to those emerging animals,” Kulakovich says.

He says he hopes to deploy one of the repaired units at Casella’s landfill by spring 2024 for testing.

The testing unit will check connectivity, remote capabilities, battery life, etc.

“We’ll want to see how the system tests out with its new parts and what kind of errors we log. But the hope is [to deploy] in the spring and then maybe wrap it up by the summer,” he says.

The ultimate goal for PSU’s industrial robotics students is to present a solution for the six robots owned by Casella and to enable the company to maintain them.

Making an impact

While the robotics department has no plans to establish a niche in selling landfill robots, Kulakovich says it hopes to continue providing repairs.

He says PSU’s robotics course projects are designed to solve real-world problems that have significant impacts.

Most costs associated with the project have been funded by the robotics lab, but Casella agreed to pay for significant repairs and new components, such as cameras.

“Is it prevalent enough ... that we could provide this? Yes. But I’m also sure that many other people can provide it,” he says of the robotics lab’s work with Casella. “With people that have these systems will come a need for what we’re doing, which is the maintenance and programming.”

The author is associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.