1. Camera Aided Robot
Progress Report

2. AIM? Develop a camera guided robot.
Has to be able to detect red circular objects and the object position in each frame.
Needs to translate image co-ordinates to real world co-ordinates for robot.
Robot uses the real world information to locate object.
Draws a dot on centre of object.

3. Dagu 4 channel motor driver
Block Diagram
Camera
USB
Pandaboard
Motor 1
Motor 2
M2OUT
M1OUT
Dagu Rover 5
4460 Core
Dagu 4 channel motor driver
M3OUT
Motor controls
encoders
USB
Arduino
Motor 3

4. System Flow Start Initialize camera and robot
Start looking for objects
object found?
object found?
Stop robot No
Yes
Detect position of object
Left
Middle
Right No No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Turn robot left
Drive forward
Turn robot right

5. Development Environment
Hardware Development Board
The development board chosen is the Pandaboard ES.
1.2GHz Dual core Arm
9 processor, SGX540
graphics core which
supporting all major
API's.
1GB RAM, Adequate memory.

6. Development Enviroment
Logitech 330 HD webcam being used for camera.
Operating System
The OS chosen for this
project is Ubuntu OMAP4.
TI kernel for the Pandaboard ES.
Support for OpenCV .
Driver support for camera’s (v4l) and arduino.

7. Development Environment
Robot
To control the robot I have
decided to use an Arduino
for the sole control of the robot.
Dual motor driver from Pololu with two MC chips has been
chosen as the motor driver.
Dagu Rover 5 is used for
the robot chassis.

8. Progress To Date Pandaboard And Ubuntu Issues
Difficult integration of Ubuntu OS and the Pandaboard.
TI kernel ondemand issue with clock solved.
Boot.script issue with RAM solved.

9. Progress To Date Application Finds red circular objects in an image.
Elliptic Morphological kernel used to manipulate image to find circular objects.
CvBlobs library used to extract circular objects which are then stored in arrays.
Kalman filter used for tracking the object based on centre point of object. noise and other external factors need to be taken into account.

10. Progress To Date Yellow x is the predicted centre of the object.
Blue square is the bounding box drawn by CvBlobs library.
The Memory used is small (Just 15 – 25 MB).

11. Progress To Date Robot & Arduino Robot is not working.
Simple code developed for Arduino to control the robot.
PWM generated depending on character received over USB serial.

12. Future Plans
Once a new motor driver is gotten the entire robot will be set up (excluding arm).
Possible change in motor driver. Dagu
provide a driver with 4 channels.
Simple starting application to
calibrate the robot.
Integrate current Application on
Pandaboard with Arduino and chassis and check
calibration.

13. Future Plans Get a robotic arm and integrate into application.
(Dagu - 2DOF Arm with
Gripper and Servos) 
Develop an algorithm to convert 2D image co-ordinates to real world co-ordinates.
Translate the real world co-ordinates into robotic arm commands and chassis movement.