Classification of therapeutic wastes using the
CNN algorithm with a 5 DOF robotic arm.
Renisha B Ronald J
Electronics and Communications Electronics and Communications
Engineering. Engineering.
Loyola-ICAM College of Loyola-ICAM College of
Engineering Engineering
and Technology and Technology
Chennai, India Chennai, India
renisha.20ec@licet.ac.in ronald.20ec@licet.ac.in
Abstract​— ​The healthcare industry plays a vital role
in the financial state of a country. The activities of the
healthcare industry protect, restore, and save the lives
of people. But the waste and by-products it produces
contain potentially harmful microorganisms that can
infect the hospital patients, healthcare workers, and
also the public. An optimal solution that will reduce the
risk of harmful microorganisms is by not employing
human beings in the field of disposal of medical wastes.
The proposed solution combines the field of robotics
and machine learning to automate the process of
medical waste segregation and disposal. A machine
learning model that can automate the classification of
waste is being built. The CNN algorithm is employed to
classify the medical wastes into four categories. After
the wastes are classified, they are picked using a 5 DOF
robotic arm which has a web camera mounted on it.
The robotic arm is built using AutoCAD software. The
web camera in the robotic arm will be able to recognize
the image and a signal will be initiated to the PIC
controller which will initiate the pick and place robotic
arm to pick the waste and drop it into the respective
bin. A conveyor belt is used to collect the wastes from
each unit in the hospital and is disposed of, which
totally reduces human involvement in this and thereby
reduces the risk of infections.
Keywords​— Machine learning, CNN algorithm, DOF,
Robotic arm, AutoCAD, PIC controller.
I. INTRODUCTION
The healthcare industry or the medical industry is a
zone that provides goods and services to treat
patients with restorative and rehabilitative care. The
healthcare industries are composed of establishments
devoted to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and
rehabilitation of medical conditions. The healthcare
industry plays a vital role in the financial state of a
country. The activities of the healthcare industry
protect, restore, and save the lives of people. But the
wastes and the by-products that are produced from
Josephin Jaffrin Gomez P
Electronics and Communications
Engineering.
Loyola-ICAM College of
Engineering
and Technology
Chennai, India
josephinjaffringomez.20ec@lice
t.ac.in
the healthcare sector are enormous and they are also
contagious to human life as they risk the lives of
healthcare workers. The medical wastes can also
cause impacts on the environment. Many of the
fields dispose of medical wastes. Some of them are
hospitals, veterinary clinics, dental clinics, funeral
homes, pharmacies, etc. Many treacherous diseases
are the effects of improper medical waste disposal.
Respiratory contamination such as tuberculosis,
Streptococcus pneumonia, and viruses like measles,
all of these can be transmitted through improper
disposal of infectious waste. HIV and AIDS are both
transmitted through items contaminated with blood
or body fluids.
To make the disposal methods conventional, the
sector disposing of the waste has to be careful with
handling the waste and also segregate them properly
according to the mandates. For this to be done
flawlessly, a sector would have to employ people
who will separate the wastes according to the
mandates and dispose of them properly. But
employing human beings in the field of medical
waste disposal will risk their lives with lots of
diseases. They are more likely to acquire infectious
diseases which sometimes might also lead to death.
To avoid such problems the machine learning
domain is used which can do the waste disposal
automatically. The machine learning domain is being
combined with the robotics which will be
automating the entire procedure that a human being
would do.
The proposed solution uses the CNN algorithm to
classify the images. The dataset is split into
validation and train images and the model after
being built was tested with the validation set. The
dataset was first labeled and then used for image
classification. The software model comprised three
convolutional layers, three pooling layers, and three
fully-connected layers to build the model. CNN
algorithm was used instead of ANN because CNN is
best suitable for spatial data such as images. The
main superiority of CNN compared to its
predecessors is that it detects all the important
features of a class without human governance. Thus
CNN algorithm is used to build the model. The
images would be trained with the CNN algorithm
and then the model can classify the images based on
their classes.
The robotic arm is designed as a 5 DOF model
using AutoCAD. It was designed using acrylic
material. The binary signal obtained from the CNN
classification results is being sent to the PIC
controller. Five servo motors were used for building
the robotic arm. The PIC controller has only two
PWN pins but the control must be over five servo
motors of the robotic arm. So the GPIO pins of the
PIC controller are utilized and generate PWM
signals on PIC GPIO pins using the timer interrupts.
The mechanical structure of the robotic arm was
completely 3D printed.
This robotic arm will pick the waste and drop it
into the respective dustbin. Medical wastes can be
classified into four types. They are infectious,
hazardous, radioactive, and general. The four-color
bins that are used to classify the medical wastes are
yellow, red, blue, and white. The yellow color
dustbin is filled with human and animal anatomical
waste, soiled waste, discarded or expired medicine,
chemical waste, and microbiology or biotechnology
or clinical laboratory wastes. The red dustbin is
filled with contaminated wastes that are recyclable.
The blue dustbin is filled with glassware and the
metallic body imparts. The white dustbin is filled
with waste sharps including metals. The waste that is
picked with the arm will now be dropped into the
respective color dustbin.
II. RELATED WORK
Guoming Chen; Yongchang Chen; Zeduo Yuan;
Xuming Lu; Xiongyong Zhu; Wanyi Li,(2019) [1]
aims to improve the recognition accuracy when
image bit-sliced classification is applied on breast
cancer image. Resulting in the simulation on breast
cancer image datasets that can improve the
recognition rate and promote classification
performance.
Shoji Kido​; ​Yasushi Hirano​; ​Noriaki
Hashimoto​,(2018) [2] image-based Cadx is
considered as the powerful one compared to
feature-based Cadx that requires an image feature
extractor for diagnosis of lung abnormalities. Also
development of image-based Cade (Computer-aided
detection) algorithm by use of CNN features for
detection of lung abnormalities.
Seong-Hyeon Han​; ​Kwang-Yeob Lee​,(2017) [4]
revolves around the implementation of image
classification CNN using a multithreaded GPU which
has 256 threads used for limiting each layer
allocation as well as for parallel processing.
Pradipta Sasmal​; ​Yuji Iwahori​; ​M. K. Bhuyan​; ​Kunio
Kasugai​,(2018) [8] shows the purpose to detect any
abnormality in the gastrointestinal tract using an
automated framework that efficiently classifies
polyps which are diagnosed and the images have
been devised. A deep CNN has been employed to
train a network and also for the classification of
polyp types and data augmentation for increasing the
number of images for classification.
Ana Riza F. Quiros​; ​Alexander C. Abad​; ​Elmer P.
Dadios​,(2015) [11] revolves about an artificial neural
network approach to an object locator and picker
which uses a pick and place robotic arm that is in a
fixed position in a limited area at which it can pick
and place the object and also can place in limited
angles only.
Roland Szabó​; ​Ioan Lie​, (2012) [20] represents the
application of color sorting using a robotic arm that
recognizes color using image recognition with a
webcam. It also revolves around replacing humans
with robots that make decisions.
Onur Koçak; Hüseyin Kurtuldu; Ali Akpek; Arif
Koçoğlu; Osman Eroğul,(2016) [25] implements
medical waste collection, separation, and
classification process that were surveyed in new city
hospitals constructed with public-private
partnerships. Through studying the medical waste
disposal methods, few suggestions regarding the most
appropriate methods and models of offset technology
investments for the city hospitals were proposed.
Selvaraj Geetha​; ​Samayan Narayanamoorthy​;
Daekook Kang​; ​Joseph Varghese Kureethara​,(2019)
[28] extends the MULTIMOORA decision-making
method with an intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy set to
evaluate the healthcare waste treatment methods.
III. DATASET
The dataset was obtained from Vecteezy. The
images have five classes. They are cotton, syringe,
gloves, face mask, and surgical head cap. For each
class, a total of 500 images were collected. They
were labeled and split into train data and validation
data. The train data contained 80% of the total data
while the validation data was 20% of the total data.
For images that have to contain all the classes
together, images were captured and some were taken
from google chrome and then all those images were
cleaned and reduced to the same size for easy
processing of the model.
IV. METHODOLOGY
A. Machine learning model
Machine learning has been procuring momentum
over the last decades in various sectors. One among
them is image classification. The machine learning
model was developed using the CNN image
classification algorithm. The image classification
technique takes an input image, learns by itself, and
then the classification result would be obtained. As
machine learning would have self-learning capability
without being explicitly programmed, the machine
learning domain is used. CNN image classification
algorithm was chosen over the other algorithms
because they can be more effective over spatial data
than any other machine learning algorithm.
1) CNN image classification: ​Python was used
as the syntax to build the CNN image classification
model. Keras, a high-level neural network API
written in Python was used as the framework. But
keras needs a backend to work on low-level
operations and thus TensorFlow is also used. For
visualizing the data Matplotlib is used and the
development environment is google colab. The
dataset was obtained from Vecteezy. CNN is a
remarkable architecture of the neural networks,
which uses some features of the visual cortex. The
principal task of image classification is acquiring the
input image and the following definition of its class.
The computer cannot see the image as human beings
can see. The computer can see an array of pixels and
not the image as humans can see them. The input
image will pass through a series of convolutional,
pooling, fully connected layers, ReLU layer i.e.
activation function, and normalization layers.
Different convolutional neural networks are built to
train the data for classification. The number of
convolutional layers is increased to check if it gives
an improvement in the performance. CNN’s with
convolutional and max-pooling layers are created to
compare their performance for the given dataset. The
number of convolution layers and the max-pooling
layers can be increased to verify and improve the
performance. The input is subjected to an activation
function called a rectified linear unit to reject any
negative value. The layers are pooled to reduce the
dimensions. The final output layer uses a sigmoid
activation function which is needed to perform
classification.
Fig. 4.1. Classification of Waste Using CNN Algorithm
B. Pick and place robotic arm
​Robotics finds applications in many industries and
sectors and one among them is the medical and
healthcare sector. Robotics is used for automation
purposes and the proposed solution consists of a pick
and place robotic arm that automates the procedure of
collecting the waste and segregating them. The
Robotic Arm uses 5 DOF to segregate the waste. It
receives pulse width modulated signals from the PIC
microcontroller and the servo motors in a robotic arm
receive pulses initiating the pick and place Robotic
Arm that is used to segregate the waste.
1) Design of robotic arm: The arm was designed
using the software, AutoCAD. The attributes that are
needed to be considered before designing the arm are
finding an appropriate servo motor and designing an
artificial servo motor to make it easy to develop the
arm. The design of the arm is decided based on the
torque values executed by the servo motor. The
torque must be maintained within 50% to 70% to
have proper functioning and also thus enabling the
arm to lift objects.
2) Functioning of robotic arm: ​The segregation of
the medical wastes would be done using the robotic
arm integrated with the machine learning backend.
When an object is being identified by the machine
learning model, it would pass a signal to the PIC
controller’s input terminal which would use serial
communication to pass the pulse width modulated
signals as output from the PIC controller to the
robotic arm. These pulse width modulated signals
would reach the servo motors in the robotic arm. The
proposed solution has five servo motors(MG996R)
which would be used to initiate the robotic arm. The
arm after being initiated scans for the dustbin color
and with the trained machine learning model it would
drop the picked waste in the bin it has to drop. For
instance, if the robotic arm detects cotton, it would
pick it and then have a wait time to scan to search the
yellow bin. Once it finds a yellow bin, the arm will
drop the waste into it. This is how the backend is
connected to the front end.
Fig.4. 2. The functioning of the Arm
V. RESULTS AND PERFORMANCE
EVALUATION
The model's efficiency was validated and the
accuracy was almost 70%. The model was trained
using a dataset obtained from Vecteezy which
contained five classes and each class had a thousand
images. The model was tested using a dataset from
Vecteezy which also had five classes and each class
had 400 images and the model was validated from the
Vecteezy dataset which had five classes and each
class contained around 300 images. The accuracy of
the validation set turned out to be 70%. The error was
0.8 which makes the machine learning model a
reliable one.
Fig. 5.1 Actual accuracy vs Validated Accuracy
From the plot, it is observed that the validated
accuracy matches the actual accuracy at some points
and this confirms the accuracy of the model.
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