Full Video

I’m working on a YouTube friendly condensed version at the moment.

[Edit: Here’s the YouTube version.]

21-9!  Take that and dance, 30+ year old technology!  I’ve got two words for you:  Inyo and Face!

Video coming soon.

So, I’ve made no progress on the camera calibration.  (Unless you want to consider failure progress because I now know more about what doesn’t work, in which case I’ve made tons and tons of progress…)  The cvCalibrateCamera2 function seems to have requirements that aren’t fully explained anywhere, except perhaps in error codes that are occasionally in Japanese.  I’m know I’m calling it wrong, but I have no idea how to call it right…   I think I’ll keep trying for a little bit longer and see if I can figure out what I’m missing.

If that doesn’t work out, then there is a slight change in strategy I’ve been considering.  You see, OpenCV has a function called “cvFindChessboardCorners”, and it is used to find the corners of a chessboard.  The corners of a chessboard are then used for calibration.  How is that going to help me, when I’m trying to find the edges of a TV and not the corners of a chessboard pattern?

Well, it’s not like Pong is the only Atari game I own or anything…

So, the robot won a game. It won largely on luck, though, it was making plenty of mistakes along the way.  But, it’s now time to move on.

See, it’s all well and nice that it can play based on the video signal from a  TV input card fed directly from the Atari into the computer.  But that’s not terribly practical, is it?  Who has a TV input card to hook an Atari up to?  What do people usually play Atari on?

They play on Channel 3.

This is going to complicate things…

Booyah!  Chew on that, Stella!

Maybe I shouldn’t have played Berzerk with the Mindstorms unit still attached to the Atari…

So, all this talk about it, and all these videos of the thing going wrong, and yet I haven’t actually posted a video of what the thing does when it’s actually working right?  Well, here you go.

And the YouTube version:

It’s a lot more subdued than when I started this morning.  The robot I had in the morning could have torn your hand off.  Now it’s much more mellow.  (Of course, I’m afraid that it’ll kill me in my sleep, but whatever…)

Two days remain, and there is still much to be done.

Computer Vision Processing Game Screen? Check.
Game Play Logic Predicting Ball Trajectory? Check.
Mindstorm Robot Attached To Paddle? Check.
Bluetooth Communication To Robot? Check.
Linking Trajectory Prediction to Robot Communication? Check.

Okay! Let’s go!

Maiden Voyage

Complex Systems Interacting To Produce Failure? Check.

That high pitched noise at the end after it jams is coming from the motor. Motors are not supposed to give off high pitched noises. Additionally, prior to jamming, it forced the potentiometer inside the paddle to skip past the end of its range a couple of times (The loud clicks that you heard). That can’t be a good thing to have it doing…

Miscellaneous Failures In Robotics

Unfortunately, no explosions.  However, parts do fly.  If you pay close attention, you’ll see a gear get thrown during the first attempt, just before everything goes wrong.

Looks like I need to be able to lock the arm in place, or it’ll keep popping up.