C06 / Offline archive
Light and colour are design decisions.
Waste-sorting robot: adapting the structure for vision
The waste-sorting robot needs to see an object before it can sort it. While trying YOLOv10 and YOLOv11, the team found that lighting changes strongly affected recognition, with sunlight changing the camera’s view.
I added a black acrylic cover around the recognition area to block external light, leaving illumination to the internal lamp. Lighting became a condition I could address through the structure.
From a white hopper to a purple background.
The hopper was initially intended to be white, but many waste objects were similar in colour and blended into the background. I painted it purple to give the camera a more distinct background.
Both changes came from debugging. An enclosure and its surface colour affect not just appearance, but how a neighbouring system operates.
