Need some professional advice on my project ~~

Hi, i am a newbie in arduino and willing to ask for advise and help from all the fellow expert here ~~

i am doing a project on identification of fruit and controlling a robot arm to cut the fruit...here is my idea on how all the system will be connected (pls give advise on it and the feasibility of it )

  1. For the identification of the fruit,a webcam and software call "roborealm" will be used which will be link to a computer for processing before connected to Arduino. It is possible ??
  2. The robot arm will move according to the ripeness of the fruit, in identifying the orientation of the arm, i will be using gyroscope and accelerometer. So here the question...will it be possible for me to use arduino to do these task and it's possible to use gyro and accel to move the arm in correct orientation ??
  3. If all this is possible, then which model of arduino should i use, and how many of it will be needed ?? ( trying to save cost and not to buy anything not necessaries)

thank in advance ~~

While not totally impossible I suspect it is above what can be achieved with an arduino and computer.
Put it this way, personally I think you haven't got a hope in hell of doing it, but don't let me stop you investigating it for your self and you coming to your own conclusion.

Recognising a fruit on a video stream, deciding what type of fruit and how ripe, recognising where the fruit is in a three dimensional world and moving a mechanical arm to interact with the fruit, are all complex problems. Solving these problems is likely to involve man-decades of work. Of course you don't have to implement everything yourself from scratch, but even understanding what approach to take and what 3rd party tools are available to help you will be a huge undertaking.

If you're at the stage of thinking "Wouldn't it bre great if ..." then I suggest you start with something a lot simpler.

Yeah id say if this is a good level project for you, you are probably more of an expert than most here
arduino is great for interfacing from a computer to actual hardware and info gathering but the intense processing aspect I think even an averge computer will have a hard time

OMG ~~~

i am so dead for my final year project....any idea on how i can simplified it and get a more or less the same system that i wanted ??

thank for the previous responds, was a great help ~~

i am so dead for my final year project.

Well your supervisor wants a good kicking for letting you attempt this.

any idea on how i can simplified it and get a more or less the same system that i wanted

Not really it is a complex system, getting a knife wheedling robot arm is a bit on the tricky side.
How about a robot arm that speared cheese on the end of a cock-tale stick.

Automated grapefruit slicer?

well, actually I would not consider it all that impossible as others are saying. It just depends on your setup. you need to change the environment to make your task easy

a) tracking

say you have a white surface, and three different fruits with distinct colors. You mount a webcam on the ceiling, looking straight down. You track the centers of the colors.

b) gripping & cutting
think of it as an x/y plotter: (something like this: http://makerbot-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/nyc1591-650x437.jpg)

the "arm" consists of a gripper with an integrated knife, mounted on a linear bearing system for movement in the x axis, and a linear actuator for movement in the y axis.

you put 3 fruits on the table, which all have similar size (fit for the gripper) and different colors. You want to cut the red apple? The software on the computer finds the centre of the red blob from the webcam feed. The "arm" moves its x position to the blobs x position. The "arm" expands until the linear actuator has positions the gripping element on the blobs y position. Then the gripping element carefully closes. The cutting element cuts it in two pieces. Then the whole thing retracts and voila.

And yes. you can do that with roborealm and arduino.

And no. even what I suggest will not be easy.

thank fkeel for the input ~~

is making anything like this difficult ??

no its not.

I actually did something very similar to that for my first arduino project. (I take it its a webcam mounted on two servo motors.) ... Sadly that was before I started documenting my work or I would send you a link.

If I may suggest. You will learn a lot more, and spend less money if you use Processing & OpenCV or any of the Processing computer-vision libraries to implement this.

RoboRealm will also do the trick, in fact it will probably be easier, but you will only learn how to use a commercial software which (to my best knowledge) is not especially relevant in the bigger picture.

Regards

p.

edit: in case you are not familiar with processing - www.processing.org (or something like that.)