Hardware and structure
The prototype consists of four main components, the structure per se, a laptop, a camera and a telescopic attachment that we use to mount the camera.
The main structure (Figure 1) was acquired from Vention (https://vention.io/), a Canadian company which offers low cost and high quality components to develop customable automated equipment. The structure consists manly of an aluminum frame, a ball screw actuator, a stepper motor, a controller, proximity sensors and a rotary encoder. All the fasteners and bolts needed for the assembly are provided by the company as well. The controller (Figure 2) has an integrated Linux single-board computer and IP connectivity and can be managed through an easy to use user interface or through the open source SDK (Would you say API, library, SDK?) which allows the user to customize the automation and integrate it with other APIs if needed. In our case we integrated the controller's API with the camera's API to automate the image acquisition process (the script can be found in this repository in the software folder as running_code.py).
We have used different camera versions: D435i (Intel RGB-D Infrared projector), OAK-D Camera (Luxonis RGB-D). BenchBot could manage a different kind of cameras until 5Kg of weight, with lighting system and extra sensor to create a proper control of the system.
