We worked on the project proposal and finalizing our mechanical design this week. We decided to not use the rotating plate for placing the fruit anymore as it would not support non-round fruits, like bananas, very well. We, instead, are planning to use a diagonally placed 2-camera system to take pictures of the fruit. We have also decided to use pistons to push the fruit in the right direction to physically sort it.
We researched pistons, specifically solenoid-type pistons, on Prof. Savvides’s suggestion, but we found them to be quite expensive. We are a little worried about using pistons as none of us have much of a mechanical background so we will discuss our mechanical design again tomorrow.
As of now, we are slightly behind schedule as we had wanted to order the parts this week but we think it is better to talk and share our parts list and reasonings to the professor and our TA on Monday before buying things. So, this is not too concerning as it is better to double-check before spending too much money. Ishita Sinha and Ishita Kumar have started looking at color analysis and image segmentation and should code up a simple working sample by next week. Kush will meanwhile take pictures for training data. If we get all this done next week, we will be very well on track.