The Vision Robotics SCOPE team will conceptualize, design, and prototype an automated fruit picking end effector for use by the tree fruit industry. The design will include considerations for low production costs, a life time on the order of millions of cycles, and a picking time of less than a second.
The Adsys SCOPE team designed a ping pong playing robot. The goal of the demonstrator is to showcase the capabilities of Adsys Controls in vision systems, dynamics, and robotics control systems. The demonstrator utilizes Adsys Controls’ ProLight-based high speed vision system as well as their commercial FPGA Image Processing Toolkit libraries. The team tackled the technically challenging problem of detecting, tracking, and manipulating a ping pong ball in real time.
Harvesting energy from ambient vibration is a promising method for providing a continuous source of power for wireless sensor nodes. However, traditional energy harvesters are often derived from resonant linear oscillators which are capable of providing sufficient output power only if the dominant frequency of input vibrations closely matches the device resonant frequency. The limited scope of such devices has sparked an interest in the use of nonlinear oscillators as mechanisms for broadband energy harvesting. In this study, we investigate the harvesting performance of an electromagnetic harvester sustaining oscillations through the phenomena of magnetic levitation. The nonlinear behavior of the device is effectively modeled by Duffing’s equation, and direct numerical integration confirms the broadband frequency response of the nonlinear harvester. The nonlinear harvester’s power generation capabilities are directly compared to a linear electromagnetic harvester with similar dynamic parameters. Experimental testing shows that the presence of both high and low amplitude solutions for the nonlinear energy harvester results in a tendency for the oscillator to remain in a low energy state for non-harmonic vibration inputs, unless continuous energy impulses are provided. We conclude by considering future applications and improvements for such nonlinear devices.