Identifying Bots from above

After a firm resolve to abstinate from using C++ for any programming project, I am back to square one - this time with a Robotics research project. The team at The Robotics lab is creating a testbed for swarm algorithms on epuck bots. This entails localization and communication. I have chosen to ID each of the bots while moving via a QR code. This will be done using OpenCV and C++. Learnt about -

• CMake
• g++ compatibility and flags
• OpenCV warping and contours
• Cascade Classifiers

The zbar library for linux makes decoding qr codes a breeze. All this while, figuring out the perfect library for this job was a red herring. It even turns out that ROS has its own wrapper library - roszbar to use the features of zbar as a ROS node, thus extending the scope of the lab to work with our TurtleBot much easier.

Here’s to visually identifying robots in a lab.