Re: $75 vision system

A vision system is not a camera. It needs to do image recognition, or at
least motion detection and simple blob counting or tracking. Examples of
commercially available self-contained units (at a reasonable price)
include the AVRCAM and the CMUcam.

For vision you can do a lot with fewer pixels. You don't need megapixel
imagers, but color can be useful.

There is no reason why there can't be a complete camera/lens/image
processing chipset for about $75. The CMUcam could be that price if they
made hundreds of thousands more of them. So, it's a matter of quantity,
and those quantities won't happen if the product is only for the amateur
robotics market. Those Sharp IR sensors are only afforable because the
"real" market is things like copiers and faucets in public bathrooms --
they sell hundreds of thousands of the sensors each year. They'd be
$50-70 bucks if they were made in low quantities.

-- Gordon


Bob wrote:
>
> Gordon McComb wrote:
> > A $75 vision system would get a lot of people back
> > into the game, for example.
>
> What would you want in a vision system? Do you have
> a feature wishlist in mind?
>
> My wife's cellphone has a 1.3 megapixel camera that
> is about the size of the eraser on the end of a
> pencil. It can take still photos, and 30fps movies.
>
> I would love to have one of those for a robot, but
> 1.3 Mpix x 30fps is a lot of data. I think the
> only way to deliver that much data would be to use
> something like high-speed USB (480 Mbps). Not
> many microcontroller based robots are going to be
> able to handle that. The minimum system would be
> maybe a mini-itx.
>
> Intel has announced a new ARM Xscale processor, the
> PXA271, that can interface directly to a CMOS camera.
> It runs at 400MHz, has 32MB of RAM and 32MB of flash
> on chip. It should be able to run Linux with no
> additional components other than a crystal. It has
> the integer XMM SIMD instructions, which should give
> it enough power to do image processing tasks like
> edge-detection. It is clearly designed for PDAs and
> cellphones, but it looks like it could be a dandy
> robot controller with integrated vision. I don't think it
> is actually shipping yet, and I don't know what the
> price will be.
.

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