I am helping a friend with ideas on building a robotic feeder for growing fish. This robot will serve many containers that will be laid out around the four walls of a newly constructed room. So far, I think that the plan is that each shelf will be several containers deep and several containers wide and there will be several shelves on each rack. The racks will be placed side by side mostly all the way around the room.
I’m starting this thread for him because I built a robot with help from this community already and am comfortable with this space. I was a complete novice when I started but have not grown enough to give him the input that he will need for this project.
He may chime in with more details, goals, corrections, constraints and preferences.
“He” (sorry, I may use “I” on occasion) hopes to build a robot that is battery powered so that it can cycle around the room continuously, for a day or two, without crossing up the wires or recharging.
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This is a picture of a robot with a large base that can house a large battery and other equipment. It could be bigger if needed. Let’s say that the base would move in the X direction although it would actually go in a square pattern with rounded corners. I am not sure, at this point, how much vertical rise, if any, will be implemented. Let’s say that the Z direction would be for a vertical boom that would also have a horizontal boom which we can call the Y direction. I included a picture of a vertical boom just for reference but may take a vastly different look as we get your input.
The Y axis is necessary so that a feeding array, that will be attached to it, can move in over the fish bins and then come out again before it moves on to the other shelve without hitting the last one or on to other rack without hitting the shelf standards. As I understand it, this array would have several units like grease guns that would dispense fish food in the form of a paste. They would need to be cooled with liquid tubing or individual Peltier thermoelectric cooling chips so that the food will not spoil during a day or more of continuous operation. This array might have several layers so that more than one shelf could be serviced with each extension and retraction.
The base will need to follow a track or line of some sort, around the inside of all of these racks. At this point we hope to design and build a self-powered base that will run along the cement floor with regular drive wheels. We also hope that the guide wheels will be controlled, as I said, by a physical track or rail system …or by a sensor based system that is close to being “off the shelf”. Most hobby sensor guided robots turn very small wheels but the weight of the base will be high and the steering will have to have a little more power to turn the wheels.
We were thinking about using an Arduino as the basic brain but the code could get ridiculous real quickly with so much stuff going on. For this reason, we thought of using a peg system that contacts or other type of sensors could “see”.
After writing some code, it would say something like: “Feed” which is, extend in Y, dispense the food and retract. Then as the base roles in the X direction, it moves along the track and around the room and the brain could simply respond to pegs or some other marker that says:
1. You have arrived at a new column/rack of shelves so stop and begin “Feed”ing the bottom set of bins and then move up.
2. You have arrived at this new set of bins so “Feed” and move up again.
3. You have arrived at the top set of bins so “Feed” and go back down. Then move to next rack of shelves.
When the user has to take shelves or rack out of service for cleaning or repair, that person could simply remove or lay down the appropriate pegs and the robot would simply skip and move on.
There is a lot of detail that needs to be added but I hope that this will paint a good enough picture. We need all of the help that we can get so we would love to get your input on any part of this project.
Here’s thanking you in advance.