8. Vision
Let's choose your robot's vision system! If your robot does not have a camera, skip to the next step.
Robots with cameras provide navigation, tracking, and interactive benefits. Synthiam ARC's software is committed to making robot programming easy, including computer vision tracking. The ARC software includes a robot camera skill to connect WiFi, USB, or video capture devices. ARC's camera device skills include tracking types for objects, colors, motions, glyphs, faces, and more. You can add additional tracking types and computer vision modules from the skill store.
Choose the Camera Type
Connects directly to a computer with a USB cable. You can only use this type of camera in an embedded computer configuration. This is because the USB cable will tether the camera to the PC. You can use any USB camera in ARC. Some advantages of using USB cameras are high resolution and increased framerate.
Connects wirelessly to a PC/SBC over a WiFi connection. Generally, this approach is only used in remote computer configurations. Few I/O controllers support a WiFi wireless camera transmission due to latency causing low resolution and potentially unreliable radio interference. For a wireless camera application, the most popular I/O controllers are the EZ-Robot EZ-B v4 and IoTiny.
Add Camera Device Robot Skill
Whichever camera type you choose, the robot skill needed to connect to the camera is the Camera Device Robot Skill. Add this robot skill to connect to the camera and begin viewing the video feed. Reading the manual for this robot skill, you will find many options for tracking objects.
Add Camera Device Robot SkillAdditional Computer Vision Robot Skills
Now that you have the camera working on your robot, you may wish to add additional computer vision robot skills. Computer vision is a general term for extracting and processing information from images. The computer vision robot skills will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to track objects, detect colors, and recognize faces. There are even robot skills to detect facial expressions to determine your mood.
Overlay images on detected objects, colors, faces and more.
Attaches to the camera control to enable servo panning by clicking on the video image.
This skill uses any camera installed on your PC or robot to combine computer vision tracking with movement and data acquisition. Computer vision is an experimental technology that requires a clean and...
Displays the detected object name on the video stream.
This skill will save snapshots from an active camera in the camera device skill. It will save a picture to your drive or device storage. The image will be saved to a folder called "My Robot Pictures"...
Overlay image packs onto the camera and control them using a specified control variable.
Use the Microsoft Cognitive Emotion cloud service to describe images. The images come from the Camera Device added to the project. This plugin requires an internet connection. Please consult the...
Use the Cognitive Face cloud service to detect faces, describe emotions, guess age and get the person's name from a worldwide database. The images come from the Camera Device robot skill added to the...
Use the Microsoft Cognitive Computer Vision cloud service to describe or read the text in images. The images come from the Camera Device added to the project. This plugin requires an internet...
You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. using Tiny YOLOv3 a very small model as well for constrained environments (CPU Only, NO GPU)
Control robot servos using your body and a Microsoft Kinect
Broadcast audio and video from ARC camera control to the web
Listens to incoming live stream connections from web and playbacks the video and audio stream inside ARC.
Omron HVC-P plugin for ARC (onboard computer). This is used in Rafiki.
Omron HVC-P2 plugin for ARC Windows, onboard PC required. This will also work with the original HVC-P.
Omron HVC-P2 plugin for ARC Windows, onboard PC required. This will also work with the original HVC-P.
Integrate state of the art image generation capabilities directly into your robot apps and products.
Super impose a camera image on another camera image
Program your robot using images printed on paper.
The QR Code Generator will create a QR Code with the text you enter. By default, the QR Code text is "Synthiam," and the QR Code Graphic is the same. Using your phone's QR Code Scanner App to scan the...
Capture the output display of a robot skill and send it to a camera device.
Rubik's Cube Solving Robot Skill that uses a camera.
Capture any area of the screen and send it to a camera device.
The Sighthound Cloud Detection API returns the location of any people and faces found in robot camera video.
Stream all video sources from any URI protocol or codec (RTMP, m3u, m3u8, Mkv, MOV, mpg, etc.). The video stream is sent to the selected camera device.
Display custom transparent PNG overlays on the camera control video output.
Display a variable on the processed camera device image
Object detection is fundemental to computer vision: Recognize what the objects are inside the robot camera and also where they are in the image.
Enable real-time object vision training using scripts
*Note: Vuzix's decision to no longer support the Synthiam platform with their newer products. Therefore, this control is limited to the deprecated 920VR headset, which may be used on eBay. There will...