RoboRealm Vision Processing - Wrappers Classes

I've been working with RoboRealm over the last week. It is a vision processing application. One of its nice features is being able to access it from another program. You can let it do the heavy lifting of extracting information from a web cam image and then your program just gets a few important data points for analysis.

The module I've been working with is Center of Gravity which locates a blob in the image and reports its size and location. In particular, I'm looking for a red circle.

The interface I've used is the RR_API which is a XML over a socket connection. Reading a single variable is straightforward but reading multiple variables with one request is a lot of detail chasing. I hate chasing details over and over again. That is why they originally created subroutines and, more recently, classes. So I wrote some classes to wrap the read variable routines. I haven't need to write information, yet, so that will wait until needed.

The files are in Google Code.

Individual variables are handled through the RoboRealmVar class and its base class RoboRealmVarBase. The base class is needed to provide an interface for reading multiple variables. More on that below.

RoboRealmVar is a template class to allow for handling different data types. One of the details with th RR interface is all data is returned as a char string so it has to be converted to the correct data type. The class handles that automatically. The header file has instances of the template for int, float, and string. Other types could be added but may need a char* to data type conversion routine. See the string instantiation for how that is done.

Variables are declared by:

rrIntVar mCogX;
rrIntVar mCogBoxSize;
rrIntVar mImageWidth;

The examples are all class members, hence the prefix 'm' on their names.

Initialize the variables with the instance of the RR class. In the example mRoboRealm is the instance of RR opened through RR_API:

mCogX("COG_X", mRoboRealm),
mImageWidth("IMAGE_WIDTH", mRoboRealm),
mCogBoxSize("COG_BOX_SIZE", mRoboRealm),

and then read them using an overload of operator():

int cogx = mCogX();

Multiple variables are read using the RoboRealmVars class. Declare it and instantiate it with:

RoboRealmVars mCogVars;
mCogVars(mRoboRealm)

Again, my examples are from inside a class.

Then add the individual variables to the list by:

mCogVars.add(mCogX);
mCogVars.add(mImageWidth);
mCogVars.add(mCogBoxSize);

then read them through:

mCogVars();

You can access their values just as shown above through the individual variables.

Hopefully this will be useful to others.

Create Fun with Grandson

Last weekend two grand kids were here. The girl, Dorian, is a teenager. The boy, Kade, is six. Just before Christmas I was working on the Fit PC Slim to iRobot Create interface when they visited. He had his nose up close asking when it would be done. He asked the same thing in another visit since then. I had to reply it was not done but I was working on it.

So this visit I just had to have something working. I got the basic wander and bump into routines working with the Slim - a reproduction of the Create demo 1 behavior. I figured that would be good for about 2 minutes of interest so needed more.

Since this project will be using a web camera for vision I used some velcro to plunk the camera onto the Create just behind the IR sensor. The velcro raised it enough to see over the top of the sensor. I brought up RoboRealm and setup its built-in web page viewer. This lets you see the camera's images. I pointed the laptop at the web pages to display what the Create was seeing.

That was good for about 20 minutes and we got called for lunch and told to put the robot away. Awwww!!!

Next visit is in a couple weeks - they are visiting here pretty regularly now. The goal is to have the Create follow a "leash" - a red dot mounted on the end of a stick. That means getting the software to talk with RR to get information on the center of gravity (COG) of the red dot and send the drive commands to the Create to center and drive toward the dot. It should stop when it gets a little bit away from the dot, and even back up if the dot gets closer.