07 Apr 2011
national-robotics-week
Next week is National Robotics Week and is
going to be quite a busy week for me. Maxwell will actually be touring the country for NRW this
year, making appearances at the following events:
Robogames - Friday April 15th to Sunday April 17th. Maxwell is entered
in the Best in Show category, as well as being featured in the Symposium.
Additionally, I'll be presenting a paper on a separate topic at the IEEE TePRA conference on Monday
and Tuesday the 11th/12th, while Maxwell is in transit across the country.
I'll be trying to upload photos/recap as the week progresses.
03 Apr 2011
maxwellrobots
The AAAI Small Scale Manipulation challenge is just a few months away now. I've been working on
a slightly different approach to chess board localization over the past few days. We had previously
been using a Canny edge detector, followed by OpenCV's probabilistic Hough transform to find
lines. From this, we iterated over hypothesis about which lines corresponded to particular
lines on the board.
Recently, I had a different thought: forget the lines, let's look at points alone. I'm now finding
the intersections of the lines, projecting those points to 3d using the point cloud, and then doing
ICP against an ideal set of intersections:
You can see fairly large red spheres inserted where each of the detected intersections is, and a TF
frame being localized into the lower corner of the board.
This is working OK so far. One issue is that the ICP is occasionally deciding that it has converged
when it is actually quite far off. I think the next step will be creating a different method for
finding the correspondence hypothesis.
30 Mar 2011
maxwellrobots
Earlier today we got Maxwell moving chess pieces around a bit. The gripper is still going
to need some improvements for a better grasp, and the gripper control software needs some
work, but:
