High Speed Hoppers, bit of apple picking and some scary sheep handlers

The Hungry Cattle solution is still going well and we now have three hoppers mounted on a turntable which reside withing the wheel base when fully loaded, but can selectively swing out to dump their feed into a trough, either at the front of the robot or to the side.

This is the 'closed' position with the weight centralised. This isn't the competition chassis, just the test one.

And then its swung round to place a hopper over a trough at the side, and also at the front if that is advantageous.

New hopper funnels are being made to throw the feed further and try to get a more even spread in the trough, and hold a bit more feed to ensure coverage.

The turntable is run on a small stepper motor but there isn't any synchronisation fitted yet so it a bit hit and miss as to where it stops. Here's a video of it rotating.

Once synchronised, the hopper will rotate in 90 degree steps. When the hopper stops over a trough, the hopper releases it's feed using the drum mechanism and the robot can move on to the next trough. The hoppers rotate back to the inboard position for refilling.

Not a lot of news published on the apple picking. Here we have one of the apple pickers and a tree worthy of Ikea, laser cut from 3mm ply.

Scary carpet eh?

The turbo-shepherd has had the first iteration of the sheep handling arms tested.

This hasn't been that successful but the idea is working ok. To improve its operation, more powerful servo motors will be chosen and the layout of the components optimised to be able to 'herd' the sheep more effectively. The video shows the arms being parked, open wide to gather sheep, and also selectively moving to push sheep to the side. The movement could be a lot faster and smoother but this is primarily to test the concepts.

Here is the updated design being built.

The challenge has been to loose as much of the mechanism in height rather than loose herding capacity, the parked position being less than 225mm wide and 100mm deep, and folding out to 325mm wide to gather the sheep. before pushing them into the sheep pen. The arms will also operate the gate mechanism.

Next up, hopefully first views of the apple picker, completing the Hungry Cattle hardware and maybe a bit more of the sheep handler design built. On a personal note, I'm just pleased RS components delivered my reel of solder today :)