I have a friend who volunteers for the local school in the parent teacher association. They spend ours counting box tops to get money for the school. I've been trying to think of ways to automate this using an arduino system, but haven't come up with any good ideas. I'm not sure if it would even be possible, but I thought I'd ask you all to see if any ideas come up.
Basically the counter would have to recognize a picture on the box top to see whether it was worth 5, 10 or 15 cents and keep track of all the tops that went through. It would also be nice if there was a way of feeding hundreds of box tops from a bin automatically. I'm drawing a blank but do any of you have an idea on either of these problems?
RoboRealm ($49) is the easiest way to get started with computer vision.
The "sorting from a bin" part is nontrivial. You could recognize the coupons on the top of the pile using computer vision (looking for a match of the coupon logo) and the easiest way to pick them up one at a time would be with a suction type of pick up tool, but the mechanics to position the tool are still mechanically "unsimple".
I think the simplest method would be to have someone position the labels on a conveyor and then try to get the computer to identify/count them as they move past a camera.
Like the others have said I would go with a short say 2 ft conveyor belt. Then have a robot aren using this gripper...Products - Lynxmotion
Then you could have it place several on a scanner and you could create some software on the computer to make a grid (each box top would be a box in the grid) and assign a value to each box. The robot arm could then easily sort them and place them into a box to be shipped out.