Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Robot Arms

Do not try this...


This, on the other hand, is a pretty good tutorial on robot arm design. The Society of Robots also offers helpful advice such as the following.

You probably won't find a reliable coefficient of friction for robot pincers rubbing up against a human neck, but using higher friction pincer material will help.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Robot Anaglyph Stereo Vision



Now time to find or write code to do this...

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Infravision: Prototype

Here are some images of the initial prototype infrared stereo vision system.
I am not quite sure why the 3D printer made the weird pattern on the front.



Here is the view from the back, the eyebrow holes are designed to hold IR LEDs for illumination.



One of the goals of this system is to be able to detect windows by using the IR reflection off of the glass. The glare from one LED seems sufficient to detect a window.



For sensor calibration it would be useful to be able to calibrate a laser scanner against the vision system. The laser scan line from a Hokuyo laser is not quite visible enough for automatic calibration. I'll try against a SICK laser later this week.



If the fluorescent lights are on, the cameras become somewhat over saturated. I am probably going to try building a rotary filter system to swap an IR notch filter and an IR band pass filter.



The ultraviolet LEDs I ordered came in today so I'll be testing those soon.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Infravision: CAD Images




Update: It looks like Example 12.3 in Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library will probably work for software with some modifications.

This lecture is also pretty good.