RoboRealm Obstacle Avoidance

[airman00]

http://www.roborealm.com/tutorial/Obstacle_Avoidance/slide010.php

[pomprocker]

link doesnt work

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: opendatabase() in /homepages/10/d91033323/htdocs/RoboRealm/header.php on line 274


but i got their email about it

[airman00]

wierd, it works for me

[Ro-Bot-X]

Just go to robotrealm.com, click on Tutorials, then click on Object Avoidance.

[SciTech02]

That was a very interesting and informative tutorial.  Darn, I wish I could have read this two years ago (Back then, I knew so little about computer vision).  Although I wish it covered more topics; such as moving from one drastically colored floor to another (white carpet to dark wood as an example), and more ideas on how the robot should move based on what it "sees" (such as implementing 3-point turning to reach a predetermined point instead only going the most clear direction).  Indeed, RoboRealm has to be one of, if not, the best software program you can download for free.

Say airman, I remember reading your robot Chives has RoboRealm.  I never heard how well it worked, or how you used it in your robot.  Do you think you can share with us your experience with it?  I would try it out myself, but my ER1 is no position to use it yet (darn laptop can barely run the ER1's software). 

[airman00]

Well I haven't worked on Chives in a while now - I have some designs for Version 2 but that will wait for a couple of months. The only real vision processing I did on him was have him follow a red shirt and drive around following it. I really wanted to do rangefinding using Roborealm ( but that Object Avoiding tutorial didn't exist back then) so I made a laser rangefinder using a laserpointer and the camera. It worked OK, but not perfectly ( a couple of months after doing that I learned of my error - which I totally don't remember off hand ).

Using that Object Avoidance tutorial and perhaps two cameras you can can have a fairly complex robot. There are tons of other cool functions that Roborealm can do - like blob tracking , color finding, talk to serial port, etc.

[SciTech02]

I see/understand.  Speaking of two cameras and rangefinding; RoboRealm still doesn't have binocular vision capabilities (except for a custom module Blackfin made for their binocular system).  All of the tutorials use single cameras, finding data by examining colors, edges, and features (no "solid" distance data, like you get from an IR or ultrasonic sensor).  This works good and perhaps the qualitative data from camera(s) in combination with quantitative data from other sensors can create a more than satisfactory robot.  But if we had binocular vision, we would get distance (quantitative data, found by using the parallax method, etc.) and features (qualitative data) to create an all-in-one sensory system (the ultimate robot, in my opinion). Well, RoboRealm is free and it can do so much already; I guess we can wait for it...

[Ro-Bot-X]

I am sure RoboRealm can do what ER1 vision does with only one camera: get the distance to the object it recognises. Having the object image asociated with a known distance in a database is what makes ER1 vision so "smart". It can't get distance to an object it does not recognise.

[SciTech02]

Agreed.  Technically, RoboRealm can do more than the ER1 and it's more developer friendly.  However, I haven't seen much when it comes to RoboRealm and object recognition.  This seems to be something that the ER1 can only do, at the moment (RoboRealm has some features that work like object recognition, but I don't know if they work as well as the ER1's).

[airman00]

yea there is object recognition

oh btw Roborealm allows for pipes to other programs running on the computer , so thats really useful.