Course 8:

Robot vision

This course gives you knowledge about how to use cameras and visual sensors to coordinate robot motion. It shows you how to turn an USB camera into an amazing vision system.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Beginner level
Category: Robotics 💬 English

What Will I Learn?

  • Learn to use color sensor for sorting.
  • Learn to take snapshots and send them by e-mail.
  • Learn to detect barcodes or QR codes.
  • Learn to detect circles and lines.
  • Learn to handle motion detection with a mouse trap.
  • Learn to control a barrier with licence plate recognition.
  • Learn to build and control a PTZ camera.

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Curriculum For This Course

Lecture 1: Introduction to visual sensors
In this lecture you will learn about the basics of vision systems. The focus will be on the color sensor. You will learn how to use this visual sensor to make decisions and to direct a robot to act according to the received information. In this lecture you will build a color sorting robot.
Lecture 2: Taking snapshots
Cameras record video streams frame by frame. Robot vision is based on processing each frame. In this lecture you will learn how to capture a frame using a USB camera when a button is pressed on your robot. You will also learn how to send the captured snapshot as an e-mail message.
Lecture 3: Face detection
Once you are able to take snapshots and capture frames from a video stream, you will often be presented with a compter vision task. In this video, one of the most interesting task is introduced: face detection. You will learn, how to setup your system to perform face detection, and how to use the captured data to control your robot.
Lecture 4: Barcode detection
Barcode detection is the most common computer vision task used today. Barcodes are scanned million times a day at every cash register in the world. In this lecture you will learn, how to build a cash register. You will capture barcodes, understand what each barcode means, than you will identify the product's price. Finally you will wirte a program, that will display the sum of the purchased goods on the barcode scanner's LCD display.
Lecture 5: Computer vision, QR code recognition
Conveyor lines in automated factories rely on QR code tags to identify the manufactured parts and a control system is implemented to tell the robots what to do with each part. In this lecture you will learn how to detect QR codes, and how to control your robot according to the detected QR code message.
Lecture 6: Motion detection (mouse trap)
In this lecture you will learn about motion detection. Detecting motion or the lack of motion using cameras is often needed in robotics. It is also used in security systems. You task in this lecture will be to build a lego mouse trap, that catches a mouse and sends the captured image in e-mail to the user.
Lecture 7: Circle detection, line detection, measurements using cameras
Computer vision systems in robotics very frequently use circle or line detection algorithms. In this lecture you will learn how to set up circle detection, line detection, and how to use line detection to measure objects.
Lecture 8: Car license plate recognition
One of the most common robotics applications is barrier control. Parking lots, parking houses, shopping malls all use smart barriers, often equipped with car license plate recognition systems. In this lecture you will learn how to build a smart barrier system that uses license plate recognition. We also add some fun, by shooting the unauthorized vehicles.
Lecture 9: Build a PTZ camera
PTZ stands for Pan, Tilt, Zoom. In this lecture you will learn how to build a PTZ camera from Lego. Actually we will cheat a little, because you will only implement pan and tilt movement control using two motors. Once you complete this course you will have a camera that can broadcast images to web browser, and that can be turned to the point of interest using keyboard commands.
Lecture 10: Use a VR headset to control your camera
In Lecture 9 you have built a PTZ camera. In this lecture you will learn how to control it from a VR headset. You will learn who to use the gyroscope in an Android mobile phone. You will learn how to use this information to control the motors to align the camera with the mobile phone. If you put this mobile phone into a VR headset your camera can track the movement of your head.

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Requirements

  • This course is designed to suit users of either the EV3 home edition or the EV3 education edition.
  • Users are required to have a Windows 10 PC with Bluetooth. (Most Windows 10 laptops have built in bluetooth support)
  • Users will need to download Ozeki 10 from www.ozeki.hu

Description

Cameras not only can be used for recording images and videos, but for image processing as well. You can meet with image processing many places in real life like for example in a parking area or in a supermarket. Many thing can be detected with a camera, starting from the simplest object like lines or circles to more complicated items like QR codes or a licence plate.

This course will give you a brief indication that how you can connect your camera to Ozeki 10, and use for various types of detection. This course provides you the opportunity to bulid many kinds of detector robots like a face detector, barcode reader, mouse trap or a licence plate detecting barrier. In the last to lecture you can bulid your own PTZ camera and learn how to control that.

The lectures in the course provide easy to follow step-by-step instructions and quiz questions. Enjoy the course!

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Who is the target audience?

This course is designed for learners who are interested in image processing and working with different kinds of camera systems.

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