sTransporter: An Autonomous Robotics System for Collecting Fresh Fruit Crates for the betterment of the Post Harvest Handling Process

Agriculture is the main source of livelihood for many people in our country. Various crops are produced seasonally but their demands are throughout the year. With the growing demands, a necessity arises to match consumer needs. So, it is important to transport the crops to the market timely, as they stay fresh only for a short duration. In this paper, we created an abstraction of the mapped model of the farm. A robot is used to traverse the arena using the belief state elimination concept and finds the shortest path using Dijkstra's algorithm to reach the crates and transmit crates pick up point to the computer simulation. The robot also communicates with the truck so that the same fruit crate in the truck opens up as soon as it reaches near the same. A wireless sensor network is used to perform this application. The design of the system is an energy-efficient implementation between coordinator and router nodes(Blender Interface and Rotating Disc). The router node responds only when it receives the node discover command from the coordinator node. Hardware simulation of the proposed system is performed using Fire Bird V, which is a research robot for algorithm development and testing. XBee protocol is used for wireless communication between different nodes.