Autonomous fruit-picking robot

Build summary

This was the term-long project for a robotics course at WPI, built on the VEX platform, where the robot had to drive to a "branch" made out of PVC pipe, find a piece of 3D printed "fruit" and bring it back to a basket. The robot had to operate completely autonomously and didn't know where it was, so every position had to be tracked by mixing information from line-following sensors, vision sensors, ultrasonic distance sensors, and limit switches.

Challenges

The biggest challenge with designing this robot was calibrating the sensors to be confident enough to pursue the next "fruit" while also careful enough to not let the robot collide with anything or get lost in the fruit field. Our team spent lots of time calibrating the camera's color codes and tuning the PID control so that the robot would work as accurately and quickly as possible.