Spinoza Demo

At the UBC Open House (Oct '95) we demostrated Spinoza chasing a colored ball. Spinoza used the controllable pan/tilt camera mounted on its head to search for and locate a colored ball. Once the ball was spotted, the pan/tilt camera would try to maintain the ball in the camera field of view while the base moved towards the ball.

For controlling Spinoza, we decoupled the control of the pan/tilt camera and the base motors. Once the ball was within the field of view of the camera, the pan/tilt camera did only one thing, try to move the camera so as to keep the ball in the centre of the field of view. The base would only consider the position of the pan/tilt camera relative to the base. It would rotate to line up the base and the camera, and then move forward. Since the gains were set so the pan/tilt device moved much faster than the base rotation, it was possible to successfully chase the ball with this simple scheme.

The purpose of this work was to program a complete behavior that Spinoza could successfully carry out, using only resources available to Spinoza on board. Creating a sustainable behavior using both visual sensing and self-motion, while simple, is a first step to more complicated tasks with Spinoza.

You can watch the performance of spinoza by downloading a large mpeg movie (~6MB), or a smaller mpeg movie (~1MB) of lower quality.

  • This page is maintained by:

    Vladimir Tucakov (tucakov@cs.ubc.ca)