CAPA Bot Captains Autonomous Personal Assistant Robot Kevin

CAPA Bot: Captain’s Autonomous Personal Assistant Robot Kevin Nelson EEL 5666 October 29, 2015

Introduction • My dog (Captain) doesn’t like picking up his toys. • Build a robot to find and retrieve his toys. • Mechanical arm with six servos. • Image processing using Open. CV and Raspberry Pi camera.

Special Sensor: Image Processing • Hardware and Software Components: • Raspberry Pi 2 • Pi camera (hardware i. e. CSI) • Open. CV (python edition) • Ball Detection Overview: • Convert image to HSV (hue, saturation, • • value) Apply a mask to the image Filter the image (blur, erode, dilate) Find the contours in the image Calculate center of ball from largest contour

Current State of Project • Software Has a Solid Foundation: • • Image processing works well. Vehicle control in place. • Hardware Needs Work… • • • Designed new chassis. Rewire/reinstall components. Control algorithm for arm. • Uncertainty: • • Time – is there enough? Mechanical arm – will it work? well? ? ?

Future Direction (i. e. Stretch Goal) • Identify and Stack Blocks: • Idea from EEL 5840 (Elements of Machine Intelligence). • More challenging and interesting problem. • Requires planning from the robot. • Amplifies existing uncertainties. • Adds software uncertainty. • Is it worth it? Image curtesy of (shamelessly stolen from): Nils J. Nilsson, Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis, San Francisco: 1998.

Questions?