SteamGearAutoPickup

Link to gear intake design

Identifying gears on the floor

• What material is the floor?
• Lets try HSV thresholding to not respond to balls. Then pick the closest?

Picking them up.

They are round so will roughly look the same from all sides.

If we have a limited gear uptake

This is likely; we need to be able to detect walls, and other obstacles that may prevent us from positioning the uptake subsystem in the correct location to uptake the gear.

assuming we can intake balls by driving up to them;

Thus the following should work:

1. Rotate robot so gear is in the center of camera frame.
2. Drive forward until a sensor detects that we have collected the gear
   1. Which sensor we use will depend on how we intake the gears; distance we can position sensor; and if it can touch, etc
      1. ultrasonic
      2. infrared collision detector
      3. Camera?
      4. limit switch?

If we have a limited gear uptake

This is likely; we need to be able to detect obstacles possibly use ultrasonic sensors or LIDAR?