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The CMUcam Vision Sensor (CMUcam)
Head: Illah Nourbakhsh
Contact: Illah Nourbakhsh (illah@ri.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated center: VASC
Associated lab/group: CREATE: Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment

For more information, see this project's homepage.

CMUcam is a new low-cost, low-power sensor for mobile robots. You can use CMUcam to do many different kinds of on-board, real-time vision processing. Because CMUcam uses a serial port, it can be directly interfaced to other low-power processors such as PIC chips.

At 17 frames per second, CMUcam can do the following:

• track the position and size of a colorful or bright object
• measure the RGB or YUV statistics of an image region
• automatically acquire and track the first object it sees
• physically track using a directly connected servo
• dump a complete image over the serial port
• dump a bitmap showing the shape of the tracked object

Using CMUcam, it is easy to make a robot head that swivels around to track an object. You can also build a wheeled robot that chases a ball around, or even chases you around. In the Gallery, you can see pictures and videos of some of the robots we and others have built with CMUcam.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• [Home] Illah Nourbakhsh - Associate Professor <illah@ri.cmu.edu>
• Anthony Rowe - PhD Student, ECE <agr@andrew.cmu.edu>

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• CMUcam3: An Open Programmable Embedded Vision Sensor
  A. Rowe, A.G. Goode, D. Goel, and I. Nourbakhsh
  tech. report CMU-RI-TR-07-13, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, May, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [275 KB] copyrighted

• A Low Cost Embedded Color Vision System
  A. Rowe, C. Rosenberg, and I. Nourbakhsh
  Proceedings of IROS 2002, 2002. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [472 KB] copyrighted

• A Simple Low Cost Color Vision System
  A. Rowe, C. Rosenberg, and I. Nourbakhsh
  Tech sketch paper presented at CVPR 2001, October, 2001. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [120 KB] copyrighted