Picking up leaves on uneven ground
I’m working on a robot that collects dry and wet leaves without pulling in too much soil. A mechanism that works on a flat, clean surface may behave very differently when the leaves are damp, the ground changes height, or the wheels lose traction.
I separated the design into locomotion, pickup, transfer, storage, and terrain-following systems. This lets me test the important functions before committing to the full robot.
Choosing a mechanism in context
The pickup mechanism has to fit beside the wheels and transfer system, move material into storage, and stay close enough to uneven ground. I compared concepts against space, manufacturability, and integration limits, then built a bottom-up BOM around the practical options.
The next tests need to distinguish picking up more material from picking up the right material. One proposed measure of pickup efficiency is:
The numerator is the mass of leaves collected, and the denominator is the leaf mass available in a defined test area. Soil needs to be measured separately. A high pickup ratio would not be enough if much of the collected load were soil.
What I’m preparing to test
The architecture, mechanism screening, and BOM support the next design decisions. I’ve defined tests for traction, pickup efficiency, soil rejection, and endurance.
The work is ongoing. These measures describe the planned evaluation; I do not have pickup or endurance results to report yet. I want subsystem tests to show where the design needs to change before building the complete machine.