BALL HARVESTER

I’m currently prototyping the ball harvester. I though about several mechanisms to “upload” the table tennis balls. Firstly the idea was to use a kind of belt conveyor but I didn’t really liked the test results. So I switched to a mechanism using just a rotating hook. The major requirement is that the hook can steadily rotate while new balls hit the vehicle. That is what a harvester should do. I’ll use the light sensor to identify how many balls are harvested. Because we’ll use plenty of balls and due to the fact the we talk about harvesting I will not actively search for the balls by e.g. using the ultra sonic sensor but do a “passive” and systematic search across the harvesting area. As soon as the maximum number of balls are collected (max. amount needs to be defined) the vehicle will drive to the handover zone.

Hardware configuration:
- 2x motors used as driving engines
- 1x motor powering the hook
- 1x light sensor to detect the harvesting area border
- 1x light sensor to detect and count the harvested balls
- Tbd: one more sensor to offload the balls