Author: ishaang

This week, I continued to work on the computer vision part of our project. After being able to interface with the Intel RealSense Depth Camera, I was able to convert the input into the HSV color space and select the range of colors for each channel that would allow us to find tennis balls. The algorithm now can locate multiple tennis balls in view of the camera and draw a target on each one to show what it is detecting. Currently, I am using my laptop to run the algorithm but will work on building the code on the Jetson Nano in the upcoming week.

Also, I helped Ryan with the hardware portion of the project and we created an initial prototype to test the motors and see if we could control them. We created a set up to find the best distance apart to keep the motors and were able to power the motors with the power supply from the Makerspace. We also programmed the Arduino to control the speed of both motors, but the motors were being very finicky at anything but their top speed.

We are not currently behind schedule and in the next week, I hope to further improve the algorithm to work better in different lighting conditions. Also, I want to work on moving the code over to the Jetson Nano where it will have to eventually run. In addition, I want to look into integrating the iRobot Create 2 API calls Rashmi is working on with the OpenCV code.

This week, much of my time was spent finalizing parts lists and submitting orders. Along with my teammates, I found sites where we could get the parts we needed such as the motors, motor controller, and mounts for the motor. A few days after submitting the order form for the parts I was in charge of finding, we found out that the iRobot Create 2 we needed was out of stock on the main website as well as on Adafruit. I spent some time looking for a different site and we found a small business that was selling the robot at a discounted price.

While waiting for parts to arrive, I worked on the Computer Vision algorithm for detecting tennis balls. It took a while to learn the OpenCV API for C++ and see what functions were available to me. Along with the efforts of my teammates, we were able to create a basic program that could mask out objects within a specified color range. We also were able to interface with the Intel RealSense camera and read data from it.

We are not currently behind schedule and in the next week hope to obtain all our needed parts. Also, I plan on continuing to develop the computer vision algorithm to be more focused on detecting tennis balls. It is likely that I will need to deal with the challenges of detecting the tennis ball in different lighting conditions without too much noise. To deal with this, I want to implement noise filtering in the computer vision algorithm by next week.