Designing an Automated Vegetable Cutter (Coursework Sample)

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION
1 Background
In the late 90’s, automation was the rage of the engineering world. The best of the minds, rallied day and night to bring forth improvements of significant magnitude, something which could make an impact in the day-to-day life. Today, it’s a plethora of fields which have embraced with automation, from manufacturing to food processing, biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. In such a scenario, domestic applications have also been developed with the commoNman iNmind. Of late, processes which were manual before are slowly being converted to semi-automated and automated nature. Manual cutting of vegetables is still prevalent, in hostels of educational institutions, marriage catering services and even in restaurants, which can cater to a whole set of varying customer tastes and preferences. The amount of vegetables to be cut for the dishes always remains higher than actually what’s consumed. The associated difficulties like time constraint, contamination, etc. make it pretty difficult for any person handling the job. Therein, arose a need to automate the process of vegetable cutting, and here we are with a proposal which can aid in easing the load off the people associated with it. (Automated cutter helps, Hope, 2014)
Vegetables are defined as an herbaceous plant or a part of a plant that is eaten whole or in part (Welbaum, 2015). Over the years, world vegetable production has increased. For example, there was over four times increase in world vegetable production from 1970 until 2009 (FAO, 2011). The increase has largely been as a result of a