BEng Individual Project
During my Bachelour year of univeristy I had to do a individual project. I chose to build and code a strawberry picking robot that used Computer Vision to find the strawberry. It would use a 3 DoF arm moved by a gantry system via belts and powered by 3 stepper motors with an vacuum end effector. It uses Computer Vision software called OpenCV and OpenKinect running on a Raspberry Pi 3B.
The main brain of the robot was a Raspberry pi 3B doing all the OpenCV coding and a Arduino Mega connected in via serial to control the stepper motor drivers for the gantry system and wheels. The stepper motors were powered by LiPo batteries in series.
In the end it could not be tested due to COVID-19 started and the UK was in lockdown. So the only test that could be done was within my bedroom. The vacuum end effector did not have enough suction to lift the fake strawberries I created to test the end effector. In addition, the Kinect Camera can't see anything closer than a metre which I accidentally presumed it could and now the strawberries position from the camera cannot be accurately calculated. Therefore, the arm was not able to pick the strawberry without me putting in the position of the strawberry from one corner of the gantry system. However, after all of this and the failures of the picking robot. I learnt a lot in the process which now if I were to start this project again or do something very similar, I would know what to do differently and what to do again that worked.
