Project Background

The premise behind creating this project is that peeling bananas is a very tedious task that many people struggle with. Since peeling bananas is such a difficult task for humans to complete, I figured it would be helpful if we had a robot that could peel bananas for us. Robots are often used by humans to perform tasks that they do not want to do themselves, so I figured a robot that could peel bananas would be a good task for a robot to (attempt to) complete.

Previous Work

There are some similar robots that have already been built for satisfying people’s fruit-peeling-related needs.

• Pelamatic has a wide assortment of robots designed to peel and/or pit various fruits, including (but not limited to) oranges, peas, and pomegranates, however, they have a distinct lack of banana-peeling robots. Most of the robots that Pelamatic has involve spinning the fruit and running a blade along the fruit, essentially doing the same thing as a wood lathe, to shave the peel off. This technique does not seem plausible for peeling bananas, but there is some inspiration to be drawn here.
• This YouTube video shows an automatic banana peeler that it appears a group of students built for a class/club. The design they used involves pushing a slightly pre-cut banana through a mechanism that pulls the peel off in one quick motion. This is an interesting approach to peeling a banana, but it does look like it requires initial setup to work, and it is not exactly what I have in mind for my banana peeling robot.
• This YouTube video shows a robot (named Baxter) controlled using TeleOp being used to peel a banana. This is Baxter’s second attempt at peeling a banana, which ends up being much more successful than the first attempt. Since the robot in this method is controlled by a human, it peels the banana the closest to how a human would, which is similar to the way I intend to peel the banana using my robot.

Tools

• Arduino Mega (for controlling the robot)
• Battery (to power the Arduino)
• 3-5 Servos (for moving parts)
• DC Motor + some sort of linear track to move an “arm” up and down
• Sensors (not sure exactly why sensors I will need, but I will look more at what I need to accomplish and whether or not I do actually need sensors)
  • Distance sensor (to locate the banana)
  • Color sensor (possibly used to try to determine if the banana has been peeled successfully)
• Various assortment of (likely) metal parts to build frame, arm, etc.