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

Robots attack in subtle ways...

Trying very hard to get this little schmuck to follow a line (done.) and then go back to where it started (not even close...).

I'm still figuring out how to work this blog site, and I think they have a tool to do this, but its very useful to use

mogrify -resize 640 *.jpg

and, if you need the package,

sudo aptitude install imagemagick