TrashBot is a speculative concept made for parks and recreation areas in urban environments where trashcans sometimes can be scarce. Trashbot envisions an armada of self-driving trashcans that you can call for through a mobile application. When going for a picnic in the park or playing football with some beers, you no longer need to go to the trashcan to throw away your waste, instead you just call a TrashBot before you leave, and the trashcan will come to you. While not implemented in the video below, in a newer iteration of TrashBot it also has different slits for sorting your trash. The concept, even though initially meant for outdoor recreation areas, could also work for indoor environments for more efficient cleaning services.
The brief demanded that the theme of our prototype would handle “politics” in some manner. This lead to a discussion about environment and how people can feel powerless in the face of environmental threats that originates in human recklessness. While this concept probably won’t be a direct contributing factor to changing the world, our goal with this concept is to help people be more environmental friendly in their direct surrounding environment and hopefully make people think and act in an environmental friendly way in other aspects of life as well.
The physical creation of TrashBot was fairly simple, we bought a radio controlled car, removed the plastic chassis and mounted a trashcan on top of the wheels that was made from laser cut MDF boards and widened the front wheel axis to support the new shift in balance and weight. To present our vision of the concept we developed a video prototype that illustrated how a possible scenario of our concept could look like in an indoors environment. We originally wanted to create an outdoors video but due to weather conditions this was not possible.