Computer Science Showcase

Well, finals are almost over, but mid-week there was a Computer Science Showcase in the Courant building at NYU. Our Robotics class had a corner where the Rovios were playing soccer and the 3πs were following lines. My Rovio, someone else's 3π:

Adjusting the Rovio to run on the hardwood floors with the different lights was a challenge -- I had to change the coefficients for distance to ball and goal and the threshold for detecting the ball. The floor made it particularly challenging because the reflection of the lights is about the same color as the tennis ball (to the robot) and so sometimes it thinks the ball is somewhere its not. Add in human interference, as a bunch of us were jammed into a 9'x9' area, and it was chaos. Also, I added a victory dance at the end, thanks to a request in the comments.

This is someone's 3π -- I have my code for this, but its not as fast as this one. Wow. The 3π uses 5 infrared sensors on the front end, along with some C++ and a PID controller to follow the line.

Also, the professor just sent out an email; looks like our class was picked up here:
http://www.slashgear.com/wowwee-rovio-taught-to-play-soccer-0642907/
and here:
http://www.robocommunity.com/blog/entry/15953/Rovio-Learns-Soccer-Bends-it-
Like-Beckham/

Rovios face off.

Blurry 3π racer

Rovio works!

The point of the whole project is to get the ball into the goal.

The algorithm goes:

1. take a picture
2. convert it from RGB to YUV
3. mask out the ball and the posts into 2 separate matrices
4. find the ball
5. turn to it
6. rotate around the ball until you find the goal
7. shoot!

And if it were only 7 lines of code my life would have been much easier for the last little while ;) Here's all the code. And here's the Rovio in action:

Woot!

The next step is to clean up and compile the code to get it ready to play soccer against the other Rovios!

Class Rovios

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/2009s-V22-0480-001/media.html

The professor put up some pics/videos of the robots in action, err... more in circles.

Picasa Facial Recognition

The facial recognition feature on Picasa (online only) is _amazing_. This was back when I had "tagged" < 1000 pics. Now I'm at ~4k and it is right about 75% of the time. This screenshot is from when I was having it search for pictures of my dad; it pulled up pictures of me and thought they could either be me, my dad, or my brother. Wow.

There is one minor issue with this one though. It was doing pretty well (except for that 4th one... don't know who that is) until the very last pic. Hm..... maybe its the shades?

Finals Snack

I know we're not quite to finals week yet, but this is the pre-final's cram week that weakens everyone; then finals come in for the final blow, no pun intended. So here's a quick snack from TJ's: Quinoa, some cilantro/chicken pot stickers (err I guess you call them dumplings over here. Btw I waited _in_ line for them, and I'm putting this _on_ line), an egg (duh) and corn + garlic fried in sesame oil and then some spinach thrown in at the last minute. And Fairway olive oil over the top ;)