Well, I am back on my schools robotic team again faced with a new challenge. We have been discussing some ideas amoungst our group but I am coming here to possibly get new suggestions. This year our objective is to build a robot that can collect 4 different colored ping pong balls off of a chair seat, and then it will need to sort out the ping pong balls based on what color they are and drop them off into their color respective boxes which are located in different locations on the floor. I believe the colors of the ping pong balls will be red, blue yellow and green. We pretty much have a basic chassis driving robot already built. We even have some ideas about collecting the balls into a collection bin. What we will probably need the most help with is to figure out some way to tell what color the balls are and then have some way for the robot to drop the correct colored ball off into the correct drop off point. I am still going over the rules so im not at a 100% of knowing the exact rules and regulations. From what I can tell, driving the robot can all be done by remote but collecting the balls, sorting them, and dropping them off in the correct locations will all have to be done autonomously or by the robots self with no input. If you guys happen to have any thoughts or ideas that maybe able to help us out, it will be greatly appreciated.

David

I am way WAY out of my league here. But I would think if you could make a vacuum hose to suck up the ping pong balls,instead of grabbing them one at a time would be nice.

This is a tip however from a guy that pretends not to know how to run the vacuum in my house

That was one idea a few guys were playing around with last semester. They havent ruled that possibility out yet but another guy came up with a different design. He is making a scraper that can position in a way where it will scrape all the balls off the front of the chair and into a single bin. Then we need to have some sort of color sensing device and sorter to distribute the balls back out in the right locations.