Robo Opp, fresh from our lab
A modern, sleek robot for all
The brains and evil genious behind Robo Opp, Harry

Inspiration

Our inspiration was just to have fun. Not many opportunities come along where you can hangout with your friends for hours and get free food and prizes while doing so. In all seriousness, Harry had gotten the idea from an MIT Maker Portfolio project he had seen. It was a robot that went around and told people who were not wearing masks to wear masks using computer vision. I came along just because I wanted to have fun.

Beginnings

One of the major issues we had early on was hardware failure. Harry was having to attempt to make parts work together that shouldn't. One example of a jerry rigged solution that is really visible on our robot is the water bottle radiator. We were using some wires as resistors and they were giving off a fair amount of heat. To keep them cool Harry decided to bunch them up and keep them submerged in water. When running, the water bottle gets fairly hot, but the wires don't melt. Really, this robot is marked in the amount of jerry rigged solution it uses.

The thing that bothered me early on was my lack of progress. It seemed liked I wasn't getting much done. I was looking at many videos on Python vision processing and I wasn't absorbing anything. Saturday though, things began to pick up. While not the best algorithm, I came up with a very computationally simple way of navigating to and shooting targets. I relied on face pixel area thresholds to determine whether or not to continue moving forward. Once close enough, I used x pixel distance from the center axis to determine whether or not it was necessary to rotate towards a target. Then, BOOM, the command could be sent to shoot the target.

Friends

If nothing else went well, being around our friends certainly would have made up for it. Some of our mutual friends had gotten the room beside us and we kept on going back and forth between both rooms and speaking over the dividers. It really helped take the edge off too. This competition has been stressful at times.

The End

Now that things are winding up, we are becoming exhausted. This is exhaustion is showing up in mistakes we are making. One of us had deleted some comments we had added to our code by executing an rm -rf command within a directory. This situation really representative of school and work in general. There are lots of times where we are in similar situations when we have to push with energy we don't have. It's usually worth it in the end though.

Built With

Submitted to

HackKU 2024
- Winner Best Hardware Project

Created by

My principal contribution was vision processing and photography. I developed exclusively in Python. Using OpenCV's pretrained Haar classifiers, I determined where faces were in a video stream and determined what movements where necessary to approach and shoot Nerf Gun bullets at targets. These movement and firing commands were communicated to an Arduino using pyserial. Harry and I agreed on a protocol for communicating these commands. In addition to coding, I did all of our photography and photography editing. My goal was to present a profession look to our team despite being a team composed of only two people.

Timo Aranjo
I worked on the hardware aspects and mechanical aspects of this project. During the competition, I was able to drill, mount the stepper motor and structural components of this project. After the main assembly was complete, I worked on the electrical, motor driver, current limiter, relay and wiring of the components. I used the atmega328p micro-controller with the Arduino framework and is programmed with the platformIO toolkit in the Linux terminal.

Harry Wang