It's been a while since I've posted any videos, so we'll pull up a really old one.
While in college, I took a robotics course where we were tasked with creating an interesting robot of some kind. Together with 2 teammates (Luke Hunter and Kyle Kuypers), I created the contraption above.
Essentially the robot is three components:
1) A paintball gun with a low-light camera mounted to the barrel
2) A microcontroller that powered a pan-tilt head (for aiming the gun) and an electronic trigger (luckily, this was a feature of the gun - we just wired into the system)
3) An application written in C for Linux (complete with OpenGL visualization) that read from the camera, found movement, aimed, and eventually fired.
When placed in 'automatic' mode, the camera could aquire a single moving person walking at normal speed, predicted their speed, 'catch up' to them as they walked, and fire almost a round per second.
Definitely a cool toy for anyone with some spare parts laying around.
|
