FlowBot

Everyday people consume water, coffee, tea, milk, etc. to maintain a healthy being. Pouring liquid is something people learn intuitively but is tricky enough that even a grown adult spills from time to time. Beyond the food industry, transferring liquid has many other general applications such as pharmaceuticals, lab work, manufacturing, etc. In most of these cases, precision is of importance. People don’t want too much milk in their coffee and a lab technician would be especially cautious mixing two chemicals.

The benefits of automating of these applications would amount to:

• Lower operating costs

• Increase production output

• Increase efficiency

• Improve worker safety

• Improve consistency in quality of product

Specific potential applications for this project are as follows:

• Helping elderly or disabled people cook, specifically with measuring and pouring ingredients

• Help with pharmaceuticals, such as consistently pouring the same measurements

• Mixing chemicals in large quantities, like at a chemical plant

• Labs that use hazardous materials by handling these materials so that workers will not need to expose themselves to them

• Resturants mixing drinks together like a Shirley Temple

• Method of picking up a cup with gripper

• How to find a position in dexterous workspace and then move end effector to that position

• Ensure the cup carried would not spill

• Incorporate precision measurement in the amount poured

The engineering complexity of this problem was a fascinating project. It composed of five main components:

• Computer Vision

• Scale Module

• Gripper Design

• Path Planning

• Control and Actuation

A single point failure in any of these components would have resulted in a failed product. This required a deep attention to detail and meticulous architecture design and testing to get a working solution. All the steps of our project implementation are equally important and must function together cohesively in order for our goal to be met. This interconnected project design is what made this project interesting because we learned how to utilize and combine these five different aspects of engineering to reach one end goal.