fruit plucking robot

The basic task that has to be performed by a fruit plucking robot are line following, fruit detection and plucking. These tasks are achieved with the help of below listed components.

The hardware requirements of a fruit plucking robot are:

a) Sensors :

Sensors are to be incorporated in building an autonomous robot to make the robot capable of sensing the external environment. Some of the sensors used are

1. White line sensor: Line detection is achieved with the help of three white line sensors placed below the chassis facing the track.

2. Sharp IR sensor: The robot to able to distinguish the ripened and the un-ripened fruit with the help of a sharp IR (distance) sensor because of the fact that the dimensions of the ripened and the un-ripened fruit are different. The ripened fruit measures 5 cm in width whereas the un-ripened fruit measures 2 cm in width. As a result if the distance between the sensor and the tree is x cm, then the ripened fruit will be at a distance of x-5 cm whereas that of an un-ripened fruit is x-2 cm. Thus the fruit is identified.

b) ADC (analog to digital convertor) and associated sensor circuit:

The output of the sensor is usually analog in nature hence for the real time interpretation of these sensors on a microcontroller requires the need for the conversion of analog signal to digital form this is achieved with the help of a inbuilt ADC of ATMEGA 2560 microcontroller.

c) Controller :

A controller circuit is required to process the environmental parameter and take appropriate actions. Hence a controller is referred to as the brain of the robotic system.

Some of the requirements of this controller are:

i. Low power consumption ii. High processing speed iii. It should support various types of pe...

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...ming the micro controller

a) IDE( integrated development environment) :

Atmel Studio is the integrated development platform (IDP) for developing and debugging Atmel ARM Cortex-M and Atmel AVR microcontroller (MCU) based applications. It gives a seamless and easy-to-use environment to write, build and debug your applications written in C/C++ or assembly code.

b) C Compiler :

WinAVR is a suite of executable, open source software development tools for the Atmel AVR series of RISC microprocessors hosted on the Windows platform. It Includes the GNU GCC compiler for C and C++.

c) Programmer :

The fire bird V robotic kit is programmed via boot loader using AVR boot loader programming software. This method of programming allows in system programming directly via the serial port with any need for external ISP programmer.

d) Device drivers for FT232 USB to serial convertor.