- ISG Undergraduate Project Student of H Grobler: CH Conroy (18072918)
- Assigned project: HG2 3D cube-world construction robot
There are a wide range of tasks that humans find trivial to complete but prove challenging for an artificial system to perform. Solving 2D puzzles is an example of such a task which has been successfully emulated by robotic systems to a limited degree. This project aims to expand on this by exploring the task of building 3D puzzles using a robot. The 3D puzzles to be investigated in this project entail both novel and moderately complex 3D shapes consisting of small cubes. The shapes will be defined by an operator through a graphical user interface (GUI) and the robot will be required to manipulate the cubes to construct the specified shape.
In order to realise this functionality, a robot capable of manipulating small cubes will be developed along with an embedded platform to perform the processing required to control the robot and cube manipulation mechanism. A PC-based computer vision system will be implemented to allow the localisation of the robot and the detection of the construction pieces (cubes). Lastly, a PC-based GUI that facilitates the definition of the 3D shapes to be constructed will be designed and implemented along with the software necessary to plan and control the robotic actions required to build the shape.