Dynamic Object Capture Using Fast Vision Tracking

VISION SYSTEM, produced by Newton Research Labs. The authors embedded the vision system in a small robot base to tie for first place in the Clean Up the Tennis Court event at the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Of particular interest is that the authors’ entry was the only robot capable of using a gripper to capture and pick up the motorized, randomly moving squiggle ball. Other examples of robotic systems using fast vision tracking are also presented, such as a robot arm capable of catching thrown objects and the soccer-playing robot team that won the 1996 Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament in Taejon, Korea.