Finding a specific object from environment

This is an extremely difficult problem.  With little knowledge of
programming, electronics, and mechanics, it's probably insurmountable.  
However, if you can throw a lot of money at the problem, you can
probably buy off-the-shelf solutions or hire someone with experience in
robotics and machine vision to solve it for you (or come as close to
solving it as possible with current technology).


You need a real computer for this level of machine vision, not a
microcontroller.  The exact sort of hardware doesn't matter all that
much; the difficulty is in the programming.


There's a huge literature on machine vision.  You might start at your
closest university library, and look for an undergraduate-level text as
an introduction to the topic.  And this is only the vision part; then
you'll need to handle navigation and eye-hand (er, camera-gripper)
coordination, etc.

Good luck,
- Joe

I concur with Joe. That is a very difficult project. We're working on a
similar project using the new Lego NXT robot to track and pickup a
colored ball on the floor ... and perhaps try not to collide with
anything while its doing that! We're using a laptop based computer over
a wireless bluetooth to perform the main computation with the robot
executing commands from the PC. The project is far from complete but
similar to a project already listed at
http://www.roborealm.com/tutorials.php  for object tracking (you have to
track and identify the object before you can pick it up!).

We'll post our results in a couple weeks on that page too. Feel free to
contact us directly if you have any further questions.

STeven.
contact@roborealm.com
www.roborealm.com

I agree, I am taking a robotic intro course and we only get into the
basics of robot vision- black objects on white background. Tell you the
truth, solving your problem could probably earn you a phd. Lucas.

I agree, I am taking a robotic intro course and we only get into the
basics of robot vision- black objects on white background. Tell you the
truth, solving your problem could probably earn you a phd. Lucas.