Alan Cleary ‘12, Kendric Evans ‘10, Michael Reed ‘12, Dr. John Peterson Who is Western State? Western State College of Colorado is a small college located in the town of Gunnison Colorado. Though appearing at other conferences, this is the first time that Western State has sent a group of CIS students to IJCAI. The group of four students, lead by Dr. John Peterson, have been hard at work learning about the academic side of robotics. The students, Alan Cleary (Sophomore), Kendric Evans (Senior), and Michael Reed (Sophomore) have all been working within the field of robotics for less than a year, inheriting the program from now graduated Chris Hickman who helped found the robotics program at the college. What We're Working With.. Western State's robotics team recently received a modified power wheels truck from a Harvey Mudd College CIS Professor, Prof. Zach Dodds. The truck, also known as A.J. (Automated Jeep), has been outfitted with an arduino board which allows the computer to interact with on-board servos directly controlling the vehicles steering and speed. Though the method of control was initially a sonar based system, the team soon abandoned this method a moved to a vision only system. Algorithms What We've Done Goals For the Future Range based color spectrum blob tracking Contrast based shape detection Indoor / outdoor light compensation Blob size speed control Adjustable turning angles Disc imaging with inverted blob detection 2D visual area management Autonomous navigation based on edge detection Speech synthesizing Location recognition Obstacle navigation Implementation of I.R. Stereo vision with depth perception Enhanced steering Basic decision making Alan testing disc imaging with inverted blob detection A.J. All gutted up. Kendric testing circle tracking with make shift supplies. Applications Automated Vision Tracking With OpenCV Though the team still has a ways to go, Western State has shown much enthusiasm and support. Many on-campus uses for this first generation robot have been proposed including Campus tours Educational workshops Interactive college promotion Simplified demonstrations of computation complexity the initial image from the camera the binary(two-color) image after a color-thresholding algorithm has filtered it into two choices: the red of the target and everything else (note: this image is the negative, so the specified color is rendered into black) the white circle is drawn around where the system believes the red circle is. This image is then used as a mask for the blob identifying algorithm. This allows the system to focus on a region of the image and ignore any other triangles the original image is rendered with a blue circle to show the located circle, a green blob showing the largest solid segment of target-red and a yellow triangle showing the identified shape inside the target circle. Testing Michael testing A.J.’s circle tracking Though the openCV library has many functions that can be easily implemented using C and C++, getting them to cooperate with one another and communicate efficiently with our python server requires much trial and error