TOEBI Makers — a robot that makes compost, with a mobile app
In 2016 my team and I represented Syria at the World Robot Olympiad in India, in the Open Category. We were a team of three.
What is WRO?
The World Robot Olympiad is a global robotics competition for young people, built around Lego Mindstorms from LEGO Education. It started in Singapore in 2004 and now draws more than 26,000 teams from over 65 countries.
The Open Category is project-based. Teams build their own robotics solution around the theme of the season and present it to a group of judges on competition day.
Why compost
The theme that season was sustainability, so we spent about three weeks looking for a real problem instead of a demo.
We landed on food waste. When it goes to landfill it decomposes and releases methane, which adds to climate change, and it wastes the water and the money that went into producing the food. Almost half of what is produced is thrown away. Composting turns that waste into something useful, but doing it by hand is slow and unpleasant.
So we built TOEBI: a robot that recycles food waste into compost, with a mobile app to go with it. We wanted something that could actually be used where we live, not a simulation.
How it went
We designed the mechanism, tested sensors, built prototypes and rewrote the program many times before the competition. In India we presented TOEBI to the judges, met teams from all over the world, and came home knowing much more about what our robot could and could not do.
You can find more in this video and the full report below:
