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Origaime ICU

A project log for Cardware

An educational system designed to bring AI and complex robotics into the home and school on a budget.

morningstarMorning.Star 03/25/2017 at 09:120 Comments

Bringing AIMos' vision system to the fold was a real challenge. Cardware could always see, because it was based on the Quad, but that had a single camera that swivelled vertically on a hinge formed from polycarbonate sheet glued into a saddle. Attempting this using cardboard turned out to be inaccurate and I could not line the camera up properly. I gave up and mounted it on the chassis.

Later the subject of vision came up again as we talked about the weight and budget, and we decided to throw caution to the winds and give Origaime depth of perception. I'd already designed a stereoscopic vision system for AIME, however her cameras were fixed and she obtained range from parallax alone.

Before AIME there were a number of experiments. Mark One called this Johnny 5 for obvious reasons but it wasnt meant that way. I couldnt shoe-horn this mechanism into her skull, which was a spherical tin that had Christmas candy in it. A thoughtful relative had selected it knowing what I'm like...

Inside the two cameras are mounted on pivots with push-rods connected to a slide moved by a servo. The software looked for motion in each frame and centred it in the field by jigging first the rotational servo to make the two Areas Of Interest equidistant from the centres, then bringing them together with the slide servo, and finally vertically by moving the tilt servo. This was done repeatedly frame-by-frame and accurately tracked motion in greyscale. In AIME I did this in software by clipping the frames around the AOI and resampling the frames to 320x240 and managed it in colour with a faster processor too. An Intel Duo laptop donated it's motherboard for the original Heavy Metal.

A decade later, all the processor power and more sits comfortably in the palm of my hand, so I am able to bring the mechanism back using the magic of Origaime.

Integrated Camera Unit

Making accurate hinges turned out to be a lot simpler than I first thought. Thinking laterally, folds in plane surfaces dont get any better at this job so I figured out a geometry that allowed the motion we need.

The mechanism was going to have to be simple, I tried everything but in the end fell back to the way it was done originally. Some things just work...

Mounting the cameras so they lined up turned out to be easier than I thought too This is more than accurate enough.

Because the angles didnt match up, being as the new front panel was wider, I had to redesign the shell body too and integrate the hinge mechanism into it for accuracy.

There were a number of modifications, the cooling ports had to be moved and the height adjusted to fit the taller camera box, plus the integral hinges. There is still work to be done to tidy this up but it now assembles and works.

The next step is to mount it on a servo so it can rotate, and hook up the cameras so I can begin coding the ranging mechanism.

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