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FIRST 2013 Robot Ideas

January 6th, 2013 | Posted by admin in Ann Arbor | automation | FIRST | Fun! | Ideas | Inspiration | Maker Works | robots - (Comments Off on FIRST 2013 Robot Ideas)

I am helping mentor with FIRST Robotics Team 830 this year. Here are the rules for the  2013 FIRST Robotics Competition.  The TL;DR is that the robot basically needs to collect and shoot frisbees and climbing a really tall tower. The video below describes things very succinctly.

 

 

We need to get this done in the mater of just a few weeks. I started looking for a few inspiration ideas.

 

A personal favorite, the RiSE robot from the KodLab. A little too complex for our timeframe.

 

 

I really like this mechanism but I am not sure it will work on the pyramid.

 

 

Here is a slightly simpler version of the same mechanism.

 

 

This is a similar approach. Not quite applicable to our situation.

 

 

Here is a FIRST team actually meeting the challenge.

 

 

This design looks like it could be used for our applications with some modifications.

 

 

On the subject the frisbee launching this mechanism rules.

Finally, a nice primer on the physics of frisbee launching.

 

Cool Stuff From CVPR 2012

June 21st, 2012 | Posted by admin in artificial intelligence | automation | classification | code | computer vision | Open Source | segmentation - (Comments Off on Cool Stuff From CVPR 2012)



Here are a few cool things that came up at CVPR. Today KIT released a benchmark data set for autonomous vehicles. KIT has spent a small fortune outfitting a vehicle with a Velodyne LIDAR, a stereo camera rig, GPS, INS, and all of the other goodies you would expect a DARPA urban challenge vehicle to have. KIT drove the vehicle around a city and recorded six hours of real world data. KIT then painstakingly rectified everything together and paid someone to mechanically segment and classify the data in the scenes (i.e. all pedestrians and vehicles have 3D boxes around them and are labeled in the data). The data is also registered to open street map data. This means that the world now has open source, real-world data for autonomous vehicle navigation. Since KIT provides benchmark along with the data it should be trivial to use the data and compare how your algorithms perform. This work will really serve to drive competition in the field.

Tomorrow at CVPR Kitware is hosting a Python for Computer Vision workshop. Kitware provides open source python tools for computer vision, and they have opened up the materials. You can find them here. I will report more information tomorrow after the workshop

SimpleCV 1.0 Released!

June 20th, 2011 | Posted by admin in Ann Arbor | automation | code | computer vision | entrepreneurship | Ingenuitas | manufacturing | Michigan | New York | Open Source | OpenCV - (Comments Off on SimpleCV 1.0 Released!)

I’ve been so busy lately that I have had no time to write about all the projects I have been working on. Today I want to take a moment to announce the release of SimpleCV 1.0 by Ingenuitas. SimpleCV is shipped as a super pack that installs SimpleCV and all of the dependencies in a single shot on all of the most common operating systems(OSX, Windows, and Linux). The Ingenuitas team has been working hard to implement most the common image processing tasks one would need to do machine inspection; and to make the process of developing applications that use these operations as quick and painless as possible. This is a big milestone for us as it means we feel that we have a good initial feature set and we can start adding more advanced features to SimpleCV, features you won’t find in OpenCV or on the existing for-pay machine inspection systems. In our next development scrum I plan to roll out a whole host of new features that make it easy to perform image based classification tasks, and to make a first pass at camera calibration and measurement tasks. Our next release will also provide much tighter integration with the Microsoft Kinect. We are also going to work up quite a few really cool demos of SimpleCV for the Detroit Makers Faire and the World Makers Faire in New York City. The video above is a dry run of one of our demos at the Ann Arbor Makers Faire. This demo is shipped with SimpleCV so feel free to download the source code and give it a shot.

Big Announcement

March 21st, 2011 | Posted by admin in Ann Arbor | automation | Automation Alley | computer vision | entrepreneurship | industrial computing | Ingenuitas | manufacturing | Michigan | Open Source - (Comments Off on Big Announcement)



I am on my way back to New York from Michigan and it is time to make it official. I have accepted the position of Director of Research and Development at Ingenuitas in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ingenuitas will be working though the summer to develop an open source hardware/software product for manufacturing inspection systems. We plan on having a demonstration of our early results in September. I will focus specifically on developing an easy to use computer vision system that brings a number of emerging computer vision techniques to the machine inspection domain. I will also seeking potential investors from the New York technology community. We hope to demonstrate that open source has the potential to dramatically reduce manufacturing costs and empower smaller companies to use techniques and quality control measures that were until recently only available to larger manufacturers. The Ingenuitas team also includes my friends Anothny Oliver and Nate Oostendorp. I am really excited for this team as I think we have the perfect mix of skills and experience to get this venture off the ground. Furthermore I am ecstatic to be working on an open source project that has the potential to dramatically change both computer vision and manufacturing for the better. I will post more thoughts about this project when I get a chance.