Today we have a guest blog post by Clarence Rossant from France an his new robot that is equipped with a camera:
"VI3WBOT is a mobile robot which is equiped by a camera (a mindsensors NXTCam V4), a color sensor, a touch sensor and a gyro sensor. Using the NXTCam V4, it can reconize and catch a yellow ball of specific size, thanks to its colour and its form.
In my first programm, I just made a recognition using colour information, but the robot also detected other yellow objects (for example the bottle of the video)! The NXTCam V4 delineates a detected object by a bounding box and outputs the coordinates of the corners (x and y). With this information, one can calculate the area and the rough form of the object. In my program, I test the area and the shape of all the yellow objects, and the robot always chooses the good object (or nothing, if no object is a yellow ball ).
The NXTCam V4 is a complex sensor, so it outputs a lot of values per second, and these values vary very quickly. To solve this problem, I created a new filter that smooths the data. It works very well! Without this "DataFilter" mini-program, VI3WBOT cannot work properly.
VI3WBOT cannot work properly either if the ambiant light is too poor (for example, a yellow ball is acquired as if it were green in the dark). So when the program starts, the screen displays the minimum luminosity that it required as well as the current ambiant light.
In the future, I will use my NXTCamV4 to make new more complex robots, like humanoïds and autonomous animals, or other "deadly" creatures...Coming very soon"