Team: 23
School: Tucumcari High
Area of Science: Engineering
Interim:
The definition of the problem:
The main problem is being able to sort different objects in a competition called bot Botball where you have to sort a various amount of items or game pieces which are many different colors and sizes. The color sorter could also be used in real life tasks.
According to the score sheet in the Botball competition, sorting several different colored game pieces is very rewarding and is almost a necessity to win.
This autonomous color sorting robot would not only help out with the Botball competition but with many other jobs and tasks. The robot could be used in many different ways in agriculture and in many different industries. It takes a long time to sort different colored nuts or bolts by hand in industries and in agriculture it would take even longer to sort rice, grains, and fruits.
Solution:
Team 23 is going to solve this problem computationally by building a robot that will be able to sort various different items using a camera to detect the color of the objects and building a mechanism to hold and sort the items efficiently. The robot will not only be able to sort colorful objects in the Botball competition but would also help in sorting multiple other objects in like rice, grains, or fruits by color or hopefully sometime even size.
Progress:
The team has mounted the camera onto the robot in the position that was the most effective. After mounting the camera the team coded the robot using C language so it is able to detect many different colors and have tested it multiple times to make sure it works. The team has also been experimenting with many different sorting mechanism designs to see which one would be the most effective. There is one sorting mechanism design that the team has decided on which is fairly simple to build so we can get started on building the mechanism. Building the sorting mechanism is the key element to the autonomous sorter which is why we started building it as soon as possible.
Expected Results:
The expected results are for the team to successfully build and program a robot that will be able to sort various items by color using a camera and a sorting mechanism. The team hopes that we can test and improve upon our designs and coding as much as possible to make it the best that it can be and we hope that the autonomous color sorting system will be flawless and be simple to use and understand.
sources:
https://www.kipr.org/curriculum-BB
https://ijarcce.com/upload/2017/march-17/IJARCCE%2092.pdf
https://soranews24.com/2014/11/18/we-examine-and-sort-each-grain-of-rice-to-find-out-if-a-manga-approved-cooking-method-works/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-does-sorting-robot-work-what-its-advantages-sotrobotics?trk=pulse-article_more-articles_related-content-card
https://www.programiz.com/c-programming/library-function
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Thomas Evans