The document proposes developing an automatic cotton picker using Internet of Things, color sensors, and image processing to address the problems of increasing labor costs for manual cotton picking. The cotton picker would use a NodeMCU microcontroller, camera, and color sensor to detect and navigate to cotton plants. It would then use mechanical fingers to remove cotton lint and seeds from the plants, providing an efficient alternative to manual labor. Potential challenges include dealing with varying climatic conditions, obstacle detection, processing time, and accurately detecting damaged cotton.
2. Idea Description
• Cotton cultivation in India ,occupying a big share in
commercial crops is facing a major problem of picking the
cotton from the plants, as the labor costs are increasing these
days.
• Looking at the current situation faced by the farmers, we have
witnessed difficulty in cotton picking manually by the farmers.
So we want to develop a hardware solution for cotton picking
in a way that reduces labor, time and maximizes efficiency.
3. Technology Stack
• Technology used: Internet of things(NodeMCU ), color
sensor and image processing.
• NodeMCU: It is an open source IOT platform. It
includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi SoC
from Espressif Systems, and hardware which is based on the
ESP-12 module .
• Image Processing: Digital image processing allows the use of
much more complex algorithms, and hence, can offer both
more sophisticated performance at simple tasks.
• In particular, digital image processing is the only practical
technology for:
Feature extraction
Multi-scale signal analysis
Pattern recognition
Projection
4. • Color sensor: The Color Sensor is a complete color detector. It
can detect and measure a nearly limitless range of visible
colors to a certain degree.
• The color of an object we can see in fact is the chromatic light
the object reflects in the white light (sunlight) after it absorbs
the rest ones. The white color is a mixture of various visible
colors. Based on the theory of three primary colors, any color
is made by mixing the three primary colors (red, green, and
blue) in a certain proportion.
6. Diagram description
• NodeMCU: It consists of a battery which regulates the movement
of the bot.
• Camera: It is used to detect the cotton plant and is fixed to the
bot.
• Image processing: With the help of camera the image of the
cotton plant is detected and the bot proceeds to move towards
the detected plant.
• Color sensor: it senses the color of cotton (i.e., white) and
proceeds to pick the cotton.
• Mechanical fingers :The cotton picker thereby must be self
propelled machine that should be capable to remove cotton lint
and seed cotton from the plant
• It runs mechanical fingers on each cotton plant pulling the lint or
cotton balls from the plant.
7. Dependencies / Show stopper
Challenges:
• Climatic conditions
• Obstacle detection
• Time consuming
• Poor detection of damaged cotton
