Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/12/real-life-portal-turret/#s:pic1-2

by marcieoum • 14 years ago

48 10 14 years ago

abcd_f• 14 years ago

Lag is pretty bad :P

alasano2• 14 years ago

Cue 'I will give my firstborn child' posts. This looks like a really fun project to work on. You have various ways of perfecting it and you know people on the internet are drooling over it.

blhack• 14 years ago

I bet you could build a really rough version of this in a week :). A polished version in a month.

The lag is pretty bad -- so no worries about any very high end CV stuff. I haven't used it, but look at OpenCV.

I actually built the image analysis bits for something that could do this a few years ago using [naively] Puthon Image Library. I was using it to take pictures of my dog while I was at work, but pointing something at her wOuldnt be a problem.

In fact, you could build a very simLe sentry turret like this using a couPle of servos and an arduino.

This is a cool project, but never feel like it's out of your reach :)

alasano2• 14 years ago

I'm not the person saying that I will give my firstborn child :P. I wouldn't feel as if it's out of reach should I desire to do it though. I'm not overly critical on prototypes!

zoop• 14 years ago

Since it seems like they are having a computer do the image analysis, background subtraction on the image processing end of things seems like it would yield much better results. Since a turret can only point at one place anyways, they don't necessarily need to pick out a single entity, so aiming at the place of last movement would aim at anything without the need of a red shirt.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's what the guy in Militarizing Your Backyard with Python[1][2] did, using OpenCV, and that could target squirrels in a natural environment.

[1] http://pyvideo.org/video/674/militarizing-your-backyard-with...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3710107

robert00700• 14 years ago

Great project, although it might have been a good idea for them to check out using the Microsoft Kinect and Point Cloud Library (It's like OpenCV for depth cameras! http://pointclouds.org/). With the 3D data you could account for the trajectory of the missiles, for example.

EvanYou• 14 years ago

I'd suggest using openFrameworks (openframeworks.cc) with which you can easily hook up a Microsoft Kinect and control the Arduino via serial.

dz13• 14 years ago

This is amazing! Wonder how hard it was to make?

jff• 14 years ago

It's a very nice hardware design, but it's certainly nothing groundbreaking--some of my classmates did the same thing for their senior project, having a nerf turret shoot at any moving object of a certain color (I believe they used a toy schoolbus, which in retrospect seems a slightly odd choice).

Still, it's a very spiffy design!

Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret

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