We finally started working in Dr. Kapila’s Mechatronics Lab. There were so many different project (research) possibilities available in this lab. We selected to work with Caesar, the lab’s robot, and he’s getting an upgrade! The robot will be given arms driven by six servomotors that will give it the ability to pick up objects.  Caesars eye’s (cameras) are also being restructured so that they can turn independently from one another.  We were given the task of helping these components of the robot communicate.

We started our research by reviewing prior research literature about robotic arms, object detection from cameras, etc., and we watched many videos to help us out with the software part of our project. We spent a lot of time working on installing openCV, a library of programming functions used for real-time computer vision, and learning how to use it. Although this week was a bit of a learning curve for us, we were able to create a program that used one camera by the middle of the week. By the end of the week, we were able to write a program that used two cameras that we configured to detect different objects.

On Friday everyone involved with the Mechatronics Lab had a group meeting with Dr. Kapila where we all shared what we’ve been working on and how much we’ve accomplished. It was nice to hear about the accomplishments everyone made along with their struggles along the way.