2013 Orlando Mini Maker Faire MATLAB Demo Part II

Remember that Maker Faire demo I posted about a few weeks ago? Well as promised here is Part 2! This time I dive into the new features I added for the demo. The video format is a bit strange in that it presents a PowerPoint, but that was a requirement for a class. I ended up leveraging this work for my image processing class this semester.

One of the easiest ways to make a demo interactive is to kid a child a maker and say draw. That is exactly what this demo does. As the child draws, the robot or swarm will follow the line. I do some image processing to find the line. The first step is to reduce the search area. This is a huge time saver when it comes to processing and removes many of the issues of shadows or various markers and body parts the camera may see. Then it does a search in this region of interest (ROI) and looks for where the line intersects the ROI.

I tried to keep the new feature as streamlined as possible to avoid the issues of degraded performance. Image processing can be quite processor intensive. Since the code was already doing a lot of processing to get to this point, I wanted to ensure that any further enhancements did not add lag.

There is always room for improvement and one of those areas would be actually projecting the line to calculate the intersection. This would probably help for the cases where the line does not intersect the edge of the ROI, but that is a feature for another time. Check out the video for more details. It came together really well!