Brownfield Remediation Robot

Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot: Reusing an abandoned and contaminated site

A robotic module that identifies and remediates the urban brownfield, a property that is abandoned and contaminated

Every modern city has an amazing amount of vacant, unused land in its downtown core-hundreds of acres in most major cities. The wasteland is referred to as a brownfield, a piece of industrial or commercial property that is abandoned, idle, or under-used and often environmental contaminated, especially one considered as a potential site for redevelopment [1]. How do we reclaim the brownfield for citizen use in a way that is flexible and contextually appropriate to the site in question? The Urban Brownfield Remediation Robot is therefore to build the capacity of neighborhoods to evaluate brownfield sites and to envision and design reuse projects. Though remote sensing, the remediation robot analyzes brownfield sites by collecting the necessary data and materials to evaluate contaminants such as Volatile Organic Components (VOCs). The data from contaminants allows the robot to decide the way to transform the site into viable and environmentally responsible sites.

Here are the images that I created for web documentation and poster. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to create animated video by using this graphical components.

Draft, growBot poster

Here's a draft of my poster for demo day. The text is all placeholder, and there are few images at present. I hope to keep the text to a minimum. Feedback appreciated!

BuddhaBot: Week 6 Progress

Brochure and booklet prototypes

I used the library's color printer to print these FYI. Trying to figure out if I could use my own paper...

Xtra-Normal for Demo Video

Hey all ... stumbled upon this WYSIWYG animation creator online tonight; apparently you PC folks have a desktop version. I spent about 20 minutes putting together this (not very good) little reel to play with. Might be useful to those of you wanting to hack together some animation for your demo video.

UPDATE: No idea why it is taking so long to render. Tis online here.

Some interesting droid videos

BuddhaBot: Week 5 Progress

Mistakes made, lessons learned

Curing the clay and painting the legs

Creating the visual assets

I'm going to have to change my project scope a bit, because I want to focus on the design and photography. Which would mean forgoing creating a book. BUT if I will still create the faux marketing materials. They will be more "real" in that I will create actual brochures and pamplets, as opposed to compiling them in a fancy hardcover book.

growBots, you got some esplaining to do!

Redroid Blog

I started a blog on the Public Design Workshop site for The Redroid Project.

http://publicdesignworkshop.net/redroidproject/

BuddhaBot: Week 4 Progress

Prototyping almost done and ready for photographing...

I've also started writing copy for the BuddhaBot related publications...

Talking to Plants

Nice suggestions on Monday! I found an article called "Talking to Plants". Also, Myth Busters did a segment on plants and their response to music.

Here's a Quote from the article

"The idea goes back at least as far as 1848, when a German, Gustav Theodor Fechner, claimed that plants had souls. Fechner was interested in mathematically measuring the relationship between stimuli and sensation, for instance the difference between the weight of an object and the perceived weight of it. I don’t know what kind of experiments he did with his plants, but I picture him shouting at his ficus until it dropped its leaves."

BuddhaBot: Week 3 Progress

Sculpting materials acquired

Designing the mass mailer and book

Progress Update

One of the questions that has been troubling me about the project is, in what form am I going to give the data back to the city? In a fruitless attempt to answer this question, I realized that this was related closely to the kind of data that I was tapping from the city.

I am still not clear about what kind of information I will extract. I would certainly like to incorporate different kinds of information, and city weather updates are part of that. For instance, if its raining in one part of the city, its natural that the rain will move to another part in due course of time, depending on where the wind will take it. But it would be useful for the second zone to be informed of the incoming rain. Just like this, traffic information could be left by people in a traffic jam in location A, and that bit of info could be sent to other parts.

One common underlying need from such case scenarios is the need to get information faster that it would normally arrive. In situations were information is available when none was previously available, its a step forward. But in situations where the information needs to reach a place in advance of the event/entity it describes, I believe this network that this project aspires to be will be very useful.

One of the things I did this week was to find out about wind patterns within a city. Usually, cities have a dozen or so wind stations located at different parts that measure the different parameters associated with the wind, in context of those locations. Until now, data of wind patterns in a city has been mostly used for prediction of spread of toxic material in the event of an accident. A project in this regard is the work done by environmental scientist Alan Huber in New York.

Redroid Project Quick Update

I am currently working on implementing communication between the Arduino and the canary. I am using the following page as a guide to obtaining data from the serial output of the canary:

http://pdw.lcc.gatech.edu/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page


Stuff on the way:

Hamster Ball
















Blimpduino












All Terrain Robot

Status report:
I am currently working with the Arduino board and Processing software. I found out I am pretty rusty in Processing so I had to breakout that old book I thought I would never have to touch again.

Designing the Story of BuddhaBot

I've decided to create a hypothetical mass mailer and a documentation book for my BuddhaBot speculative design project. I've begun sketching out layouts here:
http://www.dm.amycheng.info/buddhabot/documentation/?p=40