Structure Support of Robot Arm
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The structure of the robot arm needs to be precisely designed because it is attached to an Arduino board, which is a microcontroller that sends the commands to the robot arm. To safely have the robot arm move freely we decided to have it placed under the robot by 3D printing a stand for the robot arm.
The stand would act as the case for the Arduino board and as well as the storage case where saffron would be placed into it. The robot’s action to pick up the saffron stigma needs to be bent down so when designing the stand, we need it to be at a certain height that would be good for harvesting and for storage as well for the Arduino board case. The material that is available to design the stand is PLA that would be used in 3D printing. So, another element that we would need to be aware of is the thickness of the case so that it would sustain the weight of the robot that would be placed on top of the stand.
Moreover, keeping the saffron separated from the microcontrollers in the base, adding a protective cover over the storage box to keep the saffron safe, keeping the base flat and sturdy on the ground are few other challenges to consider for the base design process.
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Vision Processing System
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The vision processing system is the system that would provide the coordinates of the object from the camera to the robot. With the vision processing system, it would automatically give us the coordinates and we could use that information as the input of the Movement Command code for the robotic arm. We do not know how the camera would detect the object or where to place the camera because when the robot moves around the camera would also move with it. So, we would have to think into what type of position would keep the target object in the vision of the camera so the camera can send out the next command to the robot arm.
Another challenge is coordinating the 2D image from the camera and 3D movement of the robot. The camera captures images of the view field which had only x and y coordinate. But in reality, there are x, y and z coordinate to be consider where z represents the height. So, making a connection between the image coordinate and the actual location of the object is a big challenge.
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Movement Command Code
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The movement command code is the code that converts the data of the vision processing system into applicable code for the robot to pick up the target. The vision processing system gives our X and Y values, but the needed code that the robot needs are in degrees. The robot itself contains certain movement issues which give us a hard time with the direction the robot goes. Some issues that we have with the robot are that the robot grip does not open or close to the right degrees, robot motor would move in a way that would damage itself.
