Hi all,

I've recently built a strong robot platform using some geared motors and some big wheels (28cm diameter)

See it here, at the bottom:
http://www.pocketmagic.net/?p=520

Now what I need is some kind of processing unit capable of handling Video processing tasks. The motors/sensors are controlled by an atmega8, but for video I thought I should use something like an ARM processor.

Anyone can point me on some start resources?

I also have a mini itx board with a 1.3GHz celeron but that uses too much power and I can't put a big battery on the robot since the weight would be too much.

Thanks!

 

Is the video color or monochrome? Phillips makes some image processing controllers for monochrome, but for anything high resolution or color, you will need a celeron or similar - they have the MMX/SSE extensions for SIMD operations with wide registers.

There may be "notebook" versions that do not use as much power, but realtime video processing needs a good bit of horsepower.

Looking at the top of the page you linked, is the processing only tracking a certain brightness/color? If so, that does simplify it a bit, but not much. The other benefit of the x86 based is the huge pool of existing source code.

 

Thanks for your reply.

I'm not worried about the coding, since I am a developer myself.

At this step I need to see what would be the best hardware choice.

Did anyone try using a Pocket PC (running Windows Mobile) as a robot brain?
They are light weighted, need little power to run and they have lots of features like built in Wireless LAN,Bluetooth, even 3G/GSM capabilities.

thatoneguy, the first robot was only tracking a laser spot, but now I need to add face recognition and other advanced features.

 

The most compact video systems I've seen used are here: http://diydrones.com/