I want to make a robot follow me using vision

[Aerobyrd]

OK, so I am just starting to learn labview, and I have an ordains microelectronic with an ultrasonic sensor and a WebMD with labview vision. I want the robot to be able to follow me, preferably with obstacle avoidance as well. Unless someone has a better idea (which I'd be very interested to hear) I plan to use vision to keep my visual mass in the middle of the screen, and the ultrasonic to  maintain distance. Can someone help me figure out the vision part? At the moment I am having difficulty with edge finding video

[Aerobyrd]

Anti spell-check edit: ARDUINO MICROCONTROLLER with an ultrasonic sensor and a WebCAM with labview vision. also, a connected laptop runnnig labview

[SnowMule]

rofl'd @ spell checker... webmd with labview vision? 

I think rather than edge detection you'll want to search for a target/shape.  Like a big bullseye, then have it follow that.  Something with a lot of contrast between it and the background, and something that looks like nothing else in the room.

Other thing is lighting.  This is critical in machine vision.  How are you lighting the room?  In studio photography there's a "three-point light" setup that works well... a "key light" to illuminate the subejct (you), a "fill light" to flatten the light from the key, and a backlight.  For what you're doing the backlight is less important than key/fill.

A light mounted on/near the robot would probably help, tricky part would be identifying you vs. other objects in the background in software.

Hopefully someone with a little more machine vision and robotics experience will chime in.

[Aerobyrd]

thanks for the reply, i may be a little overambitious with this, but i don't want to hold a target for it. also, it needs to work in almost any lighting conditions. any help with this would be very much appreciated.

[CarlosOtiniano]

You also can search for information by artificial vision tracking color or pattern, now if you want to perform measurement of distance Might use a Kinect sensor for this work, this sensor can provide you this type of information

[CarlosOtiniano]

information related to the Kinect sensor and LabVIEW

https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/tools-network/download.kinesthesia-toolkit-for-microsoft-kin...

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Student-Projects/Kinesthesia-A-Kinect-Based-Rehabilitation-and-Surgical-Ana...

[CarlosOtiniano]

information related to vision and pattern search LabVIEW

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-30531 

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-31880 

[CMal]

You may want to take a look at this basic example, that shows how to make a robot follow a tennis ball:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Robotics-Documents/Following-a-Tennis-Ball-with-the-Starter-Kit-2-0...

Chris M

[CarlosOtiniano]

very good reference, so we compare an ARM microcontroller with sbRIO this is much better, on the other hand the question arises, is it possible to work with artificial vision sbRIO?