Topic: Projects
While going to my ECE lab this semester, every week I walked by a large box overflowing with a pile of various electrical components (resistors, capacitors, ICs). I look at this pile and just know that it's never going to be sorted out and put away, there's just way too many components for anyone to try to sort it out, and a fair percentage of them are probably bad.
It occurred to me that it would be really nice to have a machine that could take a pile of electrical components, pick them up one at a time, determine the type of component (resistor, capacitor, IC), determine the value of the component (100Ω, 100μF, IC 555), and then do some tests to verify that the component is good.
This would be useful to have around at home too, I don't have that many components at home, but it does take time to put everything back away after I've taken a project apart, and it'd be nice to let a machine handle it.
For the robotics, I figure some simple pincer arm would probably be good enough, with a single camera that can follow the pincer. The vision system would need to operate in a couple of different modes:
- When looking at the pile of components, it needs to be able to guess where a good place to send the pincer to grab a component, and needs to be able to determine when the pincer has a component. All the vision has to do is help the manipulator get something, it doesn't need to be able to pick out anything specific.
- Once a component has been picked up, the component can be swung around so that it is under better lighting conditions and against a cleaner background. At this point, the vision system just needs to be able to recognize the type of component (Resistor, Capacitor, IC)
- Once the type of component has been determined, then the vision system can use techniques specific to each component to read the value of the component. For example, for resistors, it needs to read the color bars. For ICs, it needs to orient the part so that it can OCR the text on the top of the IC.
- Lastly (and optionally), the vision system could use the ability to trace the leads or pins of the component, and guide probes into contact with the pins for performing electrical tests
I think this project should actually be within range of a hobby project, although the component testing bit may be a bit much.
What makes it most achievable is that most of the vision system requirements can be done under a controlled environment, and the one task that is not under a controlled environment (picking up the next part), does not have any stringent requirements. In fact, it could be implemented by a simple algorithm:
- Drop the pincer
- Close the pincer
- Lift the pincer
- Check to see if a single part has been caught
- If none or more than 1, open the pincer and repeat.