Help! My air hockey table grew a robot arm!

AirHockeyproject Four blog posts later and we’ve arrived at the last nostalgia blog post in the series. Ready for the story about the air hockey table that grew a Lynxmotion robot arm and learned how to play? Great! In the fall of 2004, I signed up to take a Video Processing course as a follow-up to the Digital Image Processing (DIP) course I had taken with Dr. Oge Marques (BlogTwitter). As with the DIP course, the Video Processing coursework included a term project of our choosing. I decided that it would be interesting to extend the functionality of the DIP project somehow but was not sure quite what to do. At some point along the way during the brainstorming, I remembered a robotic air hockey table I had seen when I was touring a college a few years back. That particular robotic air hockey table worked by using sensors embedded in the table surface to locate the puck as it moved and feeding that information to a robot arm. I decided to see if I could simply the idea by replacing the embedded sensors with a cheap USB web camera …

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The world’s least expensive pipetting robot

In 2005, as part of a graduate course on robotics, the team of Melissa Morris, John Morris, Thomas Kelly and I set about repurposing a JOT automation system (http://www.jotautomation.com/) which housed a four axis Hirata robot (http://www.hirata.it/) and was donated to FAU from Motorola. The system, pictured below, was originally used to print and apply barcodes in the battery compartment of cellular phones. The goal of the repurposing was to complete a project whereby the system would be converted into a pipetting robot, capable of dispensing liquids into 96-well microtiter plates. This was accomplished on an extremely lavish budget of $0.

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Robot + MATLAB + Webcam =

As the second post of the series and representing another nostalgic trip down memory lane, this post is dedicated to the first robotic vision system that I ever built.

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Dude, there’s a harmonica stuck in my printer!

I was recently rooting around on an old computer when I came across some files relating to projects I put together back in the undergraduate and graduate days. I thought they might be better served posted somewhere than gathering dust, so here we go!

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