Surveyor Robotics Journal
email:
support@surveyor.com
web:
Surveyor Corporation
rss:
Subscribe
Archives
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
Februray 2006
January 2006
Sat, 24 Oct 2009
Feature article on Surveyor SVS (stereo vision system) in Nov/Dec Robot Magazine
The latest issue of Robot Magazine has an excellent in-depth five page review of the Surveyor SVS, starting on page 30.
The author, Harry Mueller, explores many of the capabilities and limitations of the system in its current form, including stereo correspondence, neural net, picoC, RoboRealm, and other features. As Harry notes, "The SRV-1 and its most recent incarnation, the SVS, can best be characterized as a very sophisticated and evolving toolkit for vision experimentation". His conclusions are right on the money as well, though you will have to read the article to find out what he wrote.
Posted Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:04 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...
Wed, 14 Oct 2009New tool for SRV-1 Blackfin color blob searches
There is a new C library for AVR processors called "WebbotLib" that has added support for the SRV-1 Blackfin camera as an alternative to CMUcam. In the process of adding the SRV-1 support, the developer realized that we had no good tools for analyzing and selecting colors used for blob searches, so he wrote a new Java-based console, as described here.
This console is particularly useful for identifying colors and color bin ranges that will be used in blob searches. As seen above, I worked out a color range for the "red" of a spool of wire, and the actual blob outlines are displayed. The console is designed to work with serial rather than network interfaces, as this is the typical configuration for the SRV-1 Blackfin camera when connecting to an AVR-class processor.
Note that WebbotLib is an open source project - sourceforge.net/projects/webbotavrclib
Posted Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:54 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...
Sat, 10 Oct 2009Embedded Stereo Correspondence on the Surveyor SVS Blackfins
Just posted on The Streeb-Greebling Diaries, this is a very helpful explanation and demonstration of stereo correspondence on the Surveyor SVS (stereo vision system) based on code from the Sentience Project.
===========================================
A video showing the results of the stereo correspondence algorithm embedded on the Surveyor SVS. This is running on two Blackfin DSPs with synchronised frame capture. Larger red spots correspond to objects closer to the cameras. The big metal object is the left shoulder of the GROK2 robot.
There is some "pollution" where matching of horizontally oriented features causes bad matches in the surrounding region of the image, but most of the time the spot sizes are inversely proportional to range. There is always a certain amount of noise in the matching, but if the features are converted into sensor models and used to update an occupancy grid then this tends to cancel out with repeated overlapping observations.
Ordinarily horizontally oriented features can't be matched, at least by sparse feature based correspondence methods, but it does seem to be a useful heuristic to apply similar disparities to horizontally oriented features which are in the neighbourhood of matched vertically oriented ones. Even though it sometimes produces errors, this helps to provide more information about the structure of the environment which can be useful when creating maps or avoiding obstacles.
Posted Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:34 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...
Thu, 08 Oct 2009Direct interface to SRV-1 Blackfin / SVS from browsers and smart phones (iPhone, Google Android, etc) -
As first discussed last month, we have extended the httpd support in the SRV-1 Blackfin / SVS firmware for a more robust browser interface and some extended user functionality. As shown below, we have continued with the idea of image mapping the robot controls, but now we have a graphical overlay that can be turned on/off to show the actual controls.
There is still work to be done with the stability of the connections, but this seems to work quite well with iPhone and Google Android smart phones. We look forward to tester feedback.
Posted Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:11 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...