CUPID Robot

So, it's been a while since I last posted.  I've been very busy working on my Master's degree.  Luckily, my degree is in robotics, so I have been working diligently on a few projects that I want to share.  During the winter quarter, I built a robot called the "CUPID" Robot.  It is a Nerf gun wielding autonomous robot, like those in Transformers.  It essentially finds the color red, aims at it and then shoots at it.  It uses a CMUCam4 to perform the color tracking, and has 2 little Hitec motors performing tilt/pan duties.  The onboard microcontroller is a Basic ATOM, so it is a little light on the processing.  However, the robot easily finds the color red and manages to hit it pretty accurately.  The toughest part was calibrating the color sensor to always find the color and not take in too much.  CMUCam4 is a cool little device that made it easy to do color tracking with the Basic ATOM.  I would love to use it in other projects with more advanced microcontrollers.  It's also a pretty good stepping stone to more advanced image processing techniques.

Here is a video of the CUPID robot: