The most significant risk we anticipate as of now is building the conveyor belt. None of us have mechanical experience so this would definitely be challenging. However, as a contingency plan for the same, we plan on using a treadmill since the conveyor belt isn’t a part of our product – our product is meant to be integrated into existing conveyor belt systems, so if our conveyor belt doesn’t work, it doesn’t jeopardise our product itself.
The design of the system was finalised and updated, as has been shown below:
We had to make this change to the design since the earlier design that was using pistons might not have been able to meet the requirements of the product. We were using the pistons to push an item off the conveyor belt. However, doing that would require a lot of force from the pistons, which may not be feasible. The pistons could possibly also not meed the speed requirements since they operate quite slowly. Thus, we shifted to this gate model. Corresponding to this change, we updated our model to be sorting fruit into only 2 categories – good v/s rotten, so the gate can rotate in one off 2 directions to push the fruit in the appropriate basket. Correspondingly, the updated block diagram is shown:
We updated the schedule to reflect a more feasible timeline given that we have midterms going on currently. This past week, Kush worked on understanding the Nano and Ishita Kumar and Ishita Sinha worked on improving results from their image segmentation and colour analysis. For the upcoming week, they’ll be integrating their code and working on building a good classifier. Besides this, the team will also be working on the Design Review Report.