Inside the incubation lab at Punjab's Lovely Professional University (LPU), a research team of students and professors have been spending countless hours converting the idea of a smart bin into a workable prototype. The news of frontliners and sanitation workers getting infected during the handling of contaminated COVID-19 biomedical waste, prompted students Prabin Kumar Das, Vanka Vinay Kumar and KM Vaishanvi Gupta, to create a bin robot called Ally. The interactive smart bin follows voice commands and moves on predefined paths autonomously inside a controlled environment. The students, who are currently studying electronics and engineering at the university in Jalandhar, were mentored by professors Dr Lovi Raj Gupta, Dr Rajesh Singh and Dr Anita Gehlot in the exercise.

The prototype, which costs R20,000, is three feet tall, 1.5 feet wide and weighs five kilos. "With shortage of labour and the necessity of timely cleaning of bins, we thought Ally would be a valuable addition to our overburdened healthcare system," says Das. As of now, it has the capability to move on the predefined paths independently inside a controlled environment. So it can work at a hospital, but not on public street. "Let's say, you want to call the bin to room number 30, bed number 206. You call out the name [Ally] and it arrives. A combination of artificial intelligence and path learning makes this possible," he adds about the contactless collection that occurs when it flips open its cover automatically. Its sensory system senses the current level of waste and initiates the disposal process by moving to the disposal centre before it is ready for re-use.