ChapterZero

This morning my senior design group met to discuss our pre-proposal, and surprisingly, we found that our number three choice became our number one. Now we’re proposing to develop an automated sorting machine– in this case, our choice of things to sort is resistors. Why the switch? This project is useful, and much easier conceptually.

Our approach breaks the task down into two tasks: design of an algorithm to locate desired resistors in an image, and managing a robotic pincer to physically isolate the desired resistors once found. My team seems willing to let me handle the image processing part, and pretty much do nothing on the robotic part. Although designing a control algorithm for the pincer may be an interesting problem– is an algorithm really needed? we’re hoping it’ll be more of a point and grasp thing– I’m relieved to be free from dealing with hardware.

Here’s my tentative algorithm for the pre-proposal: run an edge detector on the image, isolate line segments (fortuitously for me, we’re using the resistors that are color coded with linear stripes) to locate resistors, and maybe curve extraction to determine the orientation of the resistor, for more information on how to grasp it. Once you’ve located the color stripes, you can check their color to see if the resistor is one of the ones desired. It seems pretty straightforward: even the curve extraction isn’t really needed– once you know the location of the color strips and their inclination, you pretty much know all you need to about the resistor. But… everything looks harder when you’re down in the dirt getting it working, so maybe writing the algorithm will be harder than writing the GUI after all

I’m thinking of using the Hough transform to do the line segment detection.