How Can I Improve My Image Processing Design for a Ball-Finding Robot?

[Jammin_James]

So I thought it would be fun to try to learn about digital image processing for my senior design. My group decided to make a robot that would find a ball and pick it up into a rack. Well, two people in my group was tasked with figuring out the mechanics or the robot, which they did fine, but I'm trying to figure out everything as far as image processing and hardware for the ball locator. This is all for the PDR so the design only has to be relatively thorough. We tried to present the design, but I guess my portion wasn't up to par so our whole design was rejected.

I've learned about the basics of the different edge detection methods and using the Hough Transform. At this point to pass the PDR I need to:

- Figure out parameters such as the thresholds for the Canny Edge Detection by running simulations.
- Figure out Processing time for each process given a certain processor (edge detection, hough transform).
- The hardware I need and how to configure the hardware. I thought we needed a PC to do something like this due to memory issues. I can't really figure out how to evaluate the different approaches and justifying them though.

I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out (super swamped) but I'll check back to make additions.

Thanks in advance.

 

[compxci]

Well, I sure know how you feel (as far as being swamped). At least you have other members of which to draw upon for the senior design! Not all is lost, you are learning something. Keep up the good work and hang in there.

 

[sweetpotato]

Hm, that does sound like a hard, but interesting, project. I have a close friend that did a similar robotics/DSP type project for his senior design. He had a tough time too, but ended up talking to several professors at his college that did signal processing. They were able to put him on the right track and give him some suggestions. Here's what I suggest for you:

-try to talk to someone (professors, grad students, friends, etc) who specialize in signal processing and/or robotics. Tell them about your project and what you're trying to achieve.

-Is the robot controlled by servo motors? If so try googling "servo motor tutorials" or something similar. Servo motors turned out to be the best choice for my friend's project.

-What kind of software/programming language are you thinking of using? C, C++, MATLAB, other? Try googling "C++ image processing algorithms" or something similar, as an example.

Feel free to PM me if you want, maybe I can give you some more suggestions.