Paint With The Sun Project

In this project, we developed a robotic system that automatically concentrates solar energy to a target point.

Check our latest video at: Video.

The main components of the developed system are depicted below. The robotic system needs at least 5-DOF to achieve the aforementioned objective. To this end, we integrate a 3-DOF robotic arm Dobot Magician with two servo motors (controlled by a Raspberry Pi) to cooperatively manipulate a customized end-effector, which carries a spherical Fresnel lens, an RGB camera, and a thermal camera FLIR Lepton 3.5.

We specifically design the structure of the end-effector so that the optical axis of the Fresnel lens and the optical axes of the two cameras intersect at the theoretical lens focal point, which creates a large overlapping of the FOVs of the two cameras. The pitch angle and the yaw angle of the lens are independently controlled by motor 1 and 2, while the 3-DOF translation of the lens is controlled by the robotic arm. Relying on the system kinematics, the distance between the lens center and an arbitrary target point can be set while maintaining the desirable pitch and yaw angles of the lens.

To regulate the position and energy density of the concentrated sunlight spot, we build a optics simulation of the Fresnel lens using Python.