Fruit Picking Robot

Industrial agriculture and mechanization has allowed us to reduce our dependence on centuries old farming practices that extensively relied on manual labour. Although there is a global trend of a decreasing number of agricultural workers,  agriculture is still the primary source of livelihood for 58% of India’s population. In an attempt to automate certain tedious agricultural practices we developed a robotic system to identify and collect ripened fruits during a harvest. 

We utilized a standard webcam and OpenCV to detect bright spherical objects within a background and draw bounding boxes around them. We then calculated the x and y coordinates of the center of the bounding box within each image frame. We utilized the coordinates to drive a set of motors to move the robot in a direction that aligned the center of the bounding box within the center of the entire image such that the bounding box was within a predefined grid. The Pyduino bridge library was used to relay positional information computed with Python to an Arduino. The Arduino utilized this information to control a set of motors to move in the desired direction.