Detection and Distinction of Colors Using Color Sorting Robotic Arm in a Pick and Place Mechanism

Color sorting Robot is one of the useful, costless and fastest systems in Industrial applications to reduce manual working time and provides less human mistake when manual system is undertaken. The objective of this project is to design an efficient, microcontroller based system that pick up right color of objects and put it down at right place to optimize the productivity, minimizing the cost of the products and decreasing human mistakes. In our system the TCS34725 is interfaced with the Raspberry Pi A+ board on its 2nd I2C interface channel, running Linux OS. The values are read using python script by calling the python I2C libraries. The color sensor requires a light source to illuminate the sample and a 5500K color temperature white SMD LED is used for this purpose. The sensor assembly is housed in a circular black opaque plastic ring to avoid external light interferences. As per standard RGB schemes supported by most computers and operating systems the 16 bit value is converted to 8 bit and the resultant number of color which TC34725 can differentiate totals to 16.7 million colors. A low cost approach had been used to sense the size of the sample object, wherein the requirements are that the object should be opaque. The circuit is realized using a set of comparators – 8 x LM324 for each axis, and 2 x CMOS counter type CD4017 to generate scanning in both X and Y axis. The circuitry is controlled by an 8051 core MCU (AT89S52). And is interfaced by its UART to the Raspberry Pi A+ processor board. The communication is handled in high level by the pySerial libraries.