3.2.3 Robot Pickers
The picker is a subclass of the robot class, implementing all of the functionality required in the design brief. It navigates the orchard, picking kiwifruit from the tree's, interacting with the carrier robots to co-ordinate unloading once full.
The picker robots has the following functionality:
- AI to navigate through the orchards.
- Dynamic and static entity detection and path finding.
- Inter robot communication with carrier robots.
The picker also has it's own picker specific states, these include:
- PICKING - Indicates when the picker is at an orchard row and incrementing it's load count.
- FINDING - Indicates when the picker is finding the nearest orchard row or returning home to restart.
- WAITINGFORCOLLECTION - Indicates that it has reached it's max carrying capacity and is waiting to be unloaded by the carrier robot.
The picker has the capability of sending information to both the carrier's and other picker robots in the simulation. This allows for smarter behaviors such as skipping orchard row's if they are currently being picked by another robot.
The following diagram show's the basic over view of how the picker's navigate the world.
