Sviatoslav O.

Moving ball tracking robot

Engineer	School	Area of Interest	Grade
Sviatoslav O.	Maharishi School	Software Engineering, Computer science, Programming	Rising Senior

DEMO

FIRST MILESTONE

To sum up, I want to establish what I have now.

I studied image processing and applied it
I worked with the motors and connected them to the system
I have a working project
I found the best way for the power supply of the project

SECOND MILESTONE

I had a different version of the power supply in this project. Firstly, I tried to power raspberry, motors, and ultrasonic sensors from the AA batteries. But, during long usage, I concluded that it is unstable and expensive (because isn’t rechargeable). I ran into a lot of problems during the process of buying details. I am a Ukrainian who is temporarily staying in Turkey, which means I don’t know the language, and how ordering something is working here. When I ordered, I had a lot of problems. For instance, for the body of the robot, the shop didn’t send 1 screw and I had to put one motor on a scotch tape. Moreover, I needed to buy sandpaper to wider the place for the switcher of the power supply, because it was too small to fit it. And all of this I needed to describe to the support, who speaks Turkish. Etc., etc

During the first milestone I was working on image processing. It is important to find the range of the colors in HSV pallete that suits exactly your object. You can do this with this code. The good question will be: “How exactly the code works”? I will try to explain quickly. At first, it takes an image from the Pi Cam, converts it to the HSV color space (which is better for image processing), and makes a mask from it. After, it outlines the contours and calculates the area size, which allows me to understand whether it is moving toward the ball. In addition, it assigns the coordinate axis to all this system to make it use the rotation to put the ball into the center of the Pi Cam’s image.

FINAL MILESTONE