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Ping-Pong robot
m.snow from United States [1 posts] |
16 year
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For our senior design project in mechanical engineering, we are to make a robot that plays a slow game of ping pong. The mechanical design is sound and nearly complete, but we fear that sampling rate and time delay inherent to our vision system (2 quickcam-pro-9000's with RR) will make it impossible. We use the API server to communicate with MATLAB which performs the control/prediction calculations.
Do you have any suggests to keep the frame rate maxed out and the time delays in the API communications a low as possible. Also, are you aware of any cameras that work above 30fps or hacks to make cameras work above 30fps?
Thanks much,
-M. Snow
Purdue University
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Anonymous |
16 year
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Yes, this Phillips camera is quite good and can run +30fps.
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5044149
but I'm not sure that will make much of a difference. What you will need to do is the same trick as biological animals do .. namely that of prediction. You will have to predict the path of the ball (parabolic path) in order to know where the ball *will* be in a couple seconds. This will be also required to get the mechanics to get started and connect with the ball at the right time.
The API comm should not be a speed issue assuming that you have a local network. I'd be concerned about Matlab processing speed as that is interpreted .. but if it is a small calculation that should also not be an issue.
Regardless, even at 200ms delay you can easily miss the ball .. thus the prediction is require in order to make this work. Have a look on the web at other projects similar to yours. We saw an automated pin ball machine (sorry, don't have the url) that had the same timing issue.
STeven.
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