Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Electronics => Electronics => Topic started by: shadow57 on February 20, 2008, 05:59:15 PM

Title: Wireless robot with Camera
Post by: shadow57 on February 20, 2008, 05:59:15 PM

Hi,

I'm quite interested in building a robot which can use image processing to help it navigate.  I've had a bit of experience with image processing, but I'm not too sure on how to incorporate it into a robot.

My idea is to have a wireless camera mounted on a robot that communicates to my pc, and using a program such as roborealm I can process the images.  Then based on these images I could communicate back to the robot via a UART bluetooth link.

Is this a standard way of doing things, or is their a way to connect a camera directly to the microcontroller and communicate with the computer in both directions using UART?

Any tips or suggestions on alternate ways of doing this are welcome :)

Thanks in advance for your help

Title: Re: Wireless robot with Camera
Post by: airman00 on February 20, 2008, 07:00:06 PM

search google for CMUcam or AVRcam - they connect to the microcontroller directly 


though what kind of processing are you planning to do?

Title: Re: Wireless robot with Camera
Post by: shadow57 on February 20, 2008, 09:23:35 PM

Thanks airman.

I did a search for AVRcam and stumbled over this forum post:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=2627.msg22550

The method I was thinking of is like the one suggested in the 2nd post.

The AVRcam looks very impressive... I wouldn't have thought an 8bit microcontroller could handle image processing like that.

I do quite like the idea of being able to watch and record the output of the camera, so needing to be within range of a computer is not a big deal.  To start with I'm planning to just do simple colour tracking, but would like to expand into object avoidance and recognition.  I suppose roborealm already has a lot of those features built in which might make those things easier.

Does roborealm have features to allow you to send commands over a serial conection?

Title: Re: Wireless robot with Camera
Post by: airman00 on February 20, 2008, 10:49:36 PM

Yes roborealm does all of that


Download it , and play around -- it is simply amazing!
Also check roborealm's main site , they have a lot of documentation and examples available

Also, with a wireless serial link you can do ALL the processing on the PC - even the robots locomotion processing ( driving around)


Post documentation of your robot on this site when you are done please ,  ;)

Title: Re: Wireless robot with Camera
Post by: shadow57 on February 21, 2008, 02:27:05 AM

Thanks for your help  ;D

I'm very excited about starting on this project!  I've got quite a lot of learning ahead of me so it could be some time before I have a functional robot, but when I do I'll be sure to post it on this site  :)