Hello, It has been a little while! Though there has been progress. We are working on getting things integrated into one complete system. The problem is that you can only awkwardly wedge a PiCam against things on your desk for so long before you feel the need to give up with frustration. This is why we need ourselves a purpose built arena!

Features that we want: Well defined arena colour; High quality lighting; IR comms from all directions; Mini-Jumbotron screen (ie. a screen). For the arena colour we are going for white to leave the colour spectrum free for game items, also we wanted to have little/no specular reflections to mess up the computer vision. To meet both these goals we chose white craft foam (EVA), soft and reflection free, if not as white as we had hoped.

The lighting and Comms both need to surround the arena, both could be blocked by invading hands, so we need some redundancy, also lighting from the top could lead to specular reflections ruining our CV markers.

Cheap cardboard towers for now. For the Mini-Jumbotron I am using an adafruit screen I had left over from a previous project. The screen, Pi and camera are suspended from a aluminium extrusion based gantry, that is clamped to the table using a vice.

Here is an image with the lights off, you can see that the lighting is holding its own. The screen will be used for configuring the experiment on the fly, it is touch screen, which makes quite a natural interface for identifying game objects.

This is the kind of image we can get from a camera (in this case a phone camera, as the Pi was not running at this stage of the build). Notice that the image is bright and well defined, the shadows are a little annoying, but they can be excluded easily in the computer vision algorithm.

This setup doubles as a pretty snazzy mini photo studio.

Not bad eh?

Lets have the robots explore their new home a little.

Over and out, see you all soon.