Hello everyone!
I've just joined myrobotlab community and I am tending to start right away with projects development. 

A little bit about me: I am from Mexico, so be a little patient with me if a make some gramatical errors. I am currently studying Mechatronics Engineering in the ITESM and I have some previal experience on electronics and manufacturing by some jobs that I had.

And now the fun part, the robot!

This project came from a workshop in my university, and our career director showed us this video of some model that he did in a few days.

So this is basically the idea to make; a robot capable to pick the ping pong balls from the floor and shoot them to the opponents cups. The phisical part of this project is not actually really complicated, in this moment me and my team have the electronics enough to make the movement of a little car with the control of the Arduino, we will also need to connect another pair of dc motor to regulate the consume of current of the batteries (At least 12V-1.4A) for the control of the picking and launching of the balls.

I will be uploading pitctures and some sketches in the next days with the progress of the project

And now the part where I request some advices from you guys, I want to improve the control part of the robot using the Open CV image processing in MRL to control the movement of the robot; in sinthesis I want to use is to locate the balls on the floor and align the robot to make the shoot. But I think that the complicated part is that everything has to be wireless, the camera will be mounted on the front of the robot and stream the image via bluetooth connected to my laptop. But I am not very sure how to use that bluetooth image signal in MRL and associate it with the python code to the control of the motors; I am making some research about that, I'm not so good programming yet.

But well, I will be working all day and night this weekend to make it happend! I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Thanks (:
 

kmcgerald

11 years 3 months ago

Welcome aboard. Don't worry about the language barrier. We have a lot of internation users and Google Translate to help.  :)

I'm not sure bluetooth is the right option for the wireless camera. I haven't heard of too many out there but if it is something you already have working with your laptop without MRL then we can probably find a way to make it work.  If you don't already have a bluetooth camera, I would suggest getting a WiFi camera instead.  I have a couple of cheap Foscam clones and Grog has a Foscam.  You can have your camera and laptop on the same wifi network and then MRL will pull the images from the camera over the network.  That has already been successfully accomplished.  Hopefully your laptop is not an Apple product.  I have been struggling with getting a MacBook working with the OpenCV in MRL as it is now. Grog has some future plans to change the way OpenCV works in MRL that will hopefully fix my problems but I don't have any deadlines to make it work like you might in school.

I'm pretty new to using MRL myself so I won't be as helpful as the others will.

erick_villmar

11 years 3 months ago

I think that will work just fine! I had made some tests with a local camera but I am going to look for a cheap wifi camera to start working over that. Thanks!

GroG

11 years 3 months ago

What a great project !!!  And Welcome Erick !

Along with KMC, I haven't heard of bluetooth cameras ... I did a search and found some car - rear view bluetooth cameras .. I don't know much about them..  I thought that wireless bluetooth didn't have enough bandwidth to do video ...   And I would agree with KMC - you might consider a inexpensive Foscam - which would be a WIFI IP Camera...

Thanks for the post and the great ideas....  Keep them coming !  (Mac's are evil .. EVIL I tell you !!!)