Team Magic Lego Blimps Senior Design Project - University of Texas at Dallas

My groups senior design project for college. We're a group of Computer Science majors at the University of Texas at Dallas.

This is a demonstration of the object search pattern, the robot moves in a spiral out from the center of the grid (and then spazzes out at the end). There was a bug in the program so the first 2 moves the robot makes weren't supposed to happen, but everything else up until the end was deliberate. There was no human control in this, everything was autonomously generated and driven.

The goal of the project was a mobile, remote surveillance system. We were given several lego mindstorms kits and some wireless webcams. We had to come up with a way to keep track of the robots as they move about, find and track objects, devise a way to service user requests to view certain objects of interest while maintaining a certain level of quality of service, and stream the video from the robots to the users (the user interface was a web front end).

We were supposed to accommodate multiple robots, many objects (the colored bowling pins were our targets), and many users.

We used a line following algorithm with 2 light sensors and 2 motors in the front for moving about and another motor to pan the camera. We also had an ultrasonic sensor on the front for collision detection.

We made use of the Boost C++ libraries, the OpenCV libraries, Anders' C++ Library for Lego Mindstorms, and a variety of languages, primarily C++.

There's a long story behind the team name, which has made for some great jokes, but it's not worth retelling.

Things I learned on this project:
-Research all design decisions thoroughly, including reading entire change logs in libraries (or at least the past 10 or so)
-Your professor will never be happy with your work
-Computer Vision is a really hard task to half ass well
-Lego Mindstorms isn't as great as it's cracked up to be and really shouldn't be used where precision counts

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Senior
• Design
• Lego
• Mindstorms
• University
• of
• Texas
• at
• Dallas
• UTDallas
• UTD
• Computer
• Science
• Robotics
• OpenCV
• Vision