On the current Poppy’s head design, the vision is ensured by two PS3 eye cameras. But this solution is not really convenient because:
- you have to hack the PS3 eye by removing the plastic shell:
- the usb cable is about 2m long, so you have to cut it and add an usb connector by hand.
- the driver is more or less complicated to find depending on your OS.
- the lens is big and too visible on the Poppy’s head leading to a misinterpretation of the head design. Indeed, people tends (logically) to associate the camera with the eyes of the robot while we want to display eyes on the screen:
New vision system for Poppy I:
For the next Poppy version, I am thinking to replace the PS3 Eye by the kickstarter project Pixy:
This camera is really interesting:
- Some vision extracting features are directly computed on the board. So Pixy streams only useful information like the position of tracked faces, color blobs or specific objects which can then be processed by a simple Arduino board.
- Yet, if you need it, you can still get the stream of the actual video through the usb port.
- It’s Open source (hardware and software)
- The lens is pretty big but it’s a M12 lens so you can easily change it, for example by choosing a pinhole lens.
I already ordered two of them and we should receive them in the incoming weeks.
Do you have any comment about this solution ? or interesting alternative ?