Hey, this is Shane Connelly (the team leader of this project). This article has been posted at a few websites and the same things seem to pop up time and time again (incorrectly).
1) That's actually me playing the robot in the video...and I'm actually pretty good at foosball. But it'd make for a pretty lame video if I played 100% against it ;)
2) The limiting factor was NOT the computer! Processing on a 800MHz Pentium 3 PC only introduced a total of about 1/100 second of lag -- most of the CPU cycles were spent asleep, waiting for the webcam to acquire the next image.
3) The main limiting factor was the mechanical build. None of us were mechanical engineers -- in fact, none of us had really done anything with gears/motors before this, either in class or out. Larger gears would allow the robot to move faster, but would have cost us $1500 -- wayyyyy out of our $500 total budget. Now that I've done it, though, I realize we should have just used a belt-driven system.
4) The second most limiting factor was the webcam. Philips sucks. Never buy a Philips webcam. The webcam we purchased, the SPC-900NC is listed as a USB 2.0 webcam with a frame rate of 90FPS @ 640 x 480. I think this must all be a windows driver trick where it just sends 3 frames for every 1 that it actually acquires, because the camera hardware is stuck on USB 1.1, with a maximum frame rate of 15FPS @ 320x240, in compressed image mode.
5) Yes, we realize the table wouldn't beat anything but the most novice players (not included in the video -- I actually programmed in insults that it shouts out the computer speakers whenever it scores). We built it under a "prototype" classification because we only had $500 and
that is a pretty cool project. When I was at Illinois we did something similar. I was one of the Mech E's on the project, but we also had troubles making it work with the funds...and it was also 5 years ago. I'd say you guys did a great job.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
esk @ Dec 26th 2007 11:36AM
Hey, this is Shane Connelly (the team leader of this project). This article has been posted at a few websites and the same things seem to pop up time and time again (incorrectly).
1) That's actually me playing the robot in the video...and I'm actually pretty good at foosball. But it'd make for a pretty lame video if I played 100% against it ;)
2) The limiting factor was NOT the computer! Processing on a 800MHz Pentium 3 PC only introduced a total of about 1/100 second of lag -- most of the CPU cycles were spent asleep, waiting for the webcam to acquire the next image.
3) The main limiting factor was the mechanical build. None of us were mechanical engineers -- in fact, none of us had really done anything with gears/motors before this, either in class or out. Larger gears would allow the robot to move faster, but would have cost us $1500 -- wayyyyy out of our $500 total budget. Now that I've done it, though, I realize we should have just used a belt-driven system.
4) The second most limiting factor was the webcam. Philips sucks. Never buy a Philips webcam. The webcam we purchased, the SPC-900NC is listed as a USB 2.0 webcam with a frame rate of 90FPS @ 640 x 480. I think this must all be a windows driver trick where it just sends 3 frames for every 1 that it actually acquires, because the camera hardware is stuck on USB 1.1, with a maximum frame rate of 15FPS @ 320x240, in compressed image mode.
5) Yes, we realize the table wouldn't beat anything but the most novice players (not included in the video -- I actually programmed in insults that it shouts out the computer speakers whenever it scores). We built it under a "prototype" classification because we only had $500 and
JayBandit @ Dec 26th 2007 1:07PM
that is a pretty cool project. When I was at Illinois we did something similar. I was one of the Mech E's on the project, but we also had troubles making it work with the funds...and it was also 5 years ago. I'd say you guys did a great job.
Ian @ Dec 26th 2007 8:44PM
ahh part of me could tell it was the webcam! o well slap a better one on and there u go!
TerraCotta @ Dec 26th 2007 10:31PM
Very good job. Congratulations. I wish I could realize a similar project.