RoboRealm Tutorials

Shape Matching tutorial using the Imaging Source DBX-21BF04-Z camera for part identification as objects move along a conveyor belt.

The Surveyor robot following a trail of orange squares. The goal of this tutorial is introduce different techniques for segmenting/identifying orange squares in a variety of lighting conditions. The robot should follow the trail and turn around to continue back over the trail looping from end to end. Note that no encoders or other sensors other than vision are used in this scenario. This tutorial also introduces the newest release of the Surveyor SRV1b that uses the blackfin dsp and 802.11 wireless connectivity.

Reading Digital Displays from older displays allows you to interface information from your temperature guage, water heater, barbacue temperature, coke machine, laundry timer, etc. to your PC. While most modern sensors today have the ability to interface to PC based systems at lot of the older devices do not. They do, however, offer a digital display that can be read by humans. The Digital Reader tutorial shows how one can use RoboRealm to read the digits from these devices and use that information in new ways from your PC.

Path Planning using an overhead camera looking down at a maze/arena/etc. We placed the Boe-Bot on a black surface along with red electrical tape to be used as waypoint markers. The Path Planning module then guides the Boe-Bot to visit each of these waypoints in the shortest possible path. This is a classic example of how to accomplish overhead navigation and to use the shortest path algorithm to move the robot along a defined path.

Wall Avoidance using the SRV-1 robot. We placed the SRV-1 into a small room and used vision to guide its movements to avoid the walls. This is done by looking at the floor/wall intersection and interpreting the results.

Remote Control Camera using the Orbit camera over the web. This is a quick one page tutorial on how to setup RoboRealm as a webserver to respond to requests over the web. In this example we show how to move the Orbit camera using web browser buttons.

Controlling a USB Missile Launcher Here is a fun and quick demonstration on hooking your Joystick up to a USB Missile Launcher. This tutorial shows you have to map the values from your Joystick and scale them into useable values by a usb missile launcher device.

Adding vision to the Lego NXT Want to give sight to your Lego NXT robot? Here's how we managed to add a wireless camera to the TriBot and get it to pick up a blue ball and move it over to an orange cone.

Orienting the Lego Roverbot Don't know which way your Lego bot it pointing? Use vision to figure out which way round is the front verses the back.

Color Object Tracking Target colored objects and move your robot towards those objects .. but not too close!

Visual Line Following Guide your robot along lines of any kind using just vision as your sensor. No encoders needed!

Other Tutorials

SMT PCB at home

Object Following - A simple object following robot can be built from standard off the shelf parts. Following can be accomplished via vision processing. The advantage to a vision processing follower is that little electronics knowledge is needed to build a complex robot.

The Society of Robots has an excellent series of computer vision tutorials with lots of great images. We recommend anyone exploring the field of image processing in robotics to take some time reading through those tutorials.

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