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Pixy camera to steer a boat.

Pixy Hardware
#1

Hi all,

Is a Pixy camera system able to react on a whole or part of an outside picture to sense left-right movement of that picture using that movement to eventually steer a boat.

The camera would be positioned on a small boat and “look” in the direction (heading) the boat is traveling. The only requirement is to keep the picture in the middle and use the offset (when the heading changes, e.g. due wind) to steer the boat to the original heading. I’ve been trying to do this with a magnetometer (Bosch BNO055) but this is unusable. GPS also due to the slow speed of the boat.

The steering is done via an Arduino and hydraulic pump. Knob steering with a potentiometer works fine.

Thanks, Max

#2

Hey Max,

I don’t believe that Pixy would excel at this task…it needs to be taught a brightly colored object to track, and just spits out X-Y coordinates and area (size) of the objects it’s tracking. If you do somehow have some colored beacon that you’re following, this should work fine - it would basically be very similar to our Pan/Tilt demo code, which centers the object it’s tracking in the camera field of view.

My guess is you might be able to use a vision system that supports optical flow or another kind of movement detection - I believe OpenCV is an option, or JeVois or OpenMV.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Jesse

#3

Thank you for your answer Jesse !!
Grtz, Max