Collaborate Disseminate
Anyone with a cat knows that the little purring ball of fluff in your lap is one tiny step away from turning into a bloodthirsty serial killer. Give kitty half a chance and something small and defenseless is going to meet a slow, painful end. And you little killer is …read more
People take their tabletop games very, very seriously. [Andrew Lauritzen], though, has gone far above and beyond in pursuit of a fair game. The game in question is Star War: X-Wing, a strategy wargame where miniature pieces are moved according to rolls of the dice. [Andrew] suspected that …read more
Continue reading Automated Dice Tester Uses Machine Vision to Ensure a Fair Game
Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races. What this means is that using a single camera …read more
Continue reading Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean
In the “Automate the Freight” series, I’ve concentrated on stories that reflect my premise that the killer app for self-driving vehicles will not be private passenger cars, but will more likely be the mundane but necessary task of toting things from place to place. The economics of replacing thousands of …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Amazon’s Robotic Packaging Lines
Eyes are windows into the soul, the old saying goes. They are also pathways into the mind, as much of our brain is involved in processing visual input. This dedication to vision is partly why much of AI research is likewise focused on machine vision. But do artificial neural networks …read more
Continue reading Artificial Neural Networks Help Hack Biological Counterparts
A superlative bit of combinatorial scholarship coming out of St. Louis University, where Sean Hartling, Vasit Sagan, Paheding Sidike, Maitiniyazi Maimaitijiang and Joshua Carron have lashed-up geospatial sciences, machine learning, UAVs, and no-small… Continue reading When a Tree Falls in St. Louis, Will the Power Go Out?
It’s one thing to know that your device is leaking electromagnetic interference (EMI), but if you really want to solve the problem, it might be helpful to know where the emissions are coming from. This heat-mapping EMI probe will answer that question, with style. It uses a webcam to record …read more
Continue reading Camera Sees Electromagnetic Interference Using an SDR and Machine Vision
We salute hackers who make technology useful for people in emerging markets. Leigh Johnson joined that select group when she accepted the challenge to build portable machine vision units that work offline and can be deployed for under $100 each. For hardware, a Raspberry Pi with camera plus screen can …read more
Continue reading Leigh Johnson’s Guide To Machine Vision On Raspberry Pi
For all those who have complained about Rubik’s Cube solving robots in the past by dismissing purpose-built rigs that hold the cube in a non-anthropomorphic manner: checkmate.
The video below shows not only that a robot can solve the classic puzzle with mechanical hands, but it can also do it with just one of them – and that with only three fingers. The [Yamakawa] lab at the University of Tokyo built the high-speed manipulator to explore the kinds of fine motions that humans perform without even thinking about them. Their hand, guided by a 500-fps machine vision system, uses two …read more
Continue reading Robot Solves Rubik’s Cube With One Hand Tied Behind Its Back
The last few weeks have seen a number of tech sites reporting on a robot which can find and point out Waldo in those “Where’s Waldo” books. Designed and built by Redpepper, and add agency. The robot arm is a UARM Metal, with a Raspberry Pi controlling the show.
A Logitech c525 webcam captures images, which are processed by the Pi with OpenCV, then sent to Google’s cloud-based AutoML Vision service. AutoML is trained with numerous images of Waldo, which are used to attempt a pattern match. If a pattern is found, the coordinates are fed to PYUARM, and the …read more