Written by Administrator |
Wednesday, 24 November 2010 14:12 |
The Omnidirectional Vision Turret (OVT) was developed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL. The purpose of this extension is to provide basic omnidirectional vision capabilities to the epuck, without the expense of complex processing hardware. Using a simple microcontroller, the turret is capable of advanced vision tasks such as distinguishing colour blogs in any direction, finding other robots in its vicinity, and basic navigation. Vision SystemOmnidirectional vision is achieved using a standard perspective camera (the same VGA camera used on the e-Puck) looking up on a custom-designed hyperbolic mirror. The mirror was designed to provide a full 360 degree view around the robot, and can see up to 5 degrees above the horizon. An added advantage of the OVT is that it is not a top turret! All the signals from the e-Puck are passed on to a top PCB using card-edge connectors, which allows other turrets to be stacked on top of the OVT. HardwareThe CMOS camera is connected to a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) frame buffer (Averlogic AL440B-24-PBF), which is then connected to a microcontroller (dsPIC33FJ256GP506 from Microchip). The frame buffer allows de-coupling between the camera and the microcontroller, which means that the microcontroller is no longer a slave to the camera, and can read an image at whatever pace is required from the frame buffer. FirmwareSeveral algorithms have been implemented, including basic drivers for reading an image from the camera, as well as image processing algorithms. There are two ways of reading the image:
Some basic image processing algorithms have also been implemented on the dsPIC
The firmware for the OVT will be posted on the download page once the bugs have been ironed out. Detailed schematics and PCB gerber files for the Omnidirectional Vision Turret can be found on the Download Page . This extension was designed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL. |
Last Updated on Wednesday, 01 December 2010 10:33 |