Anyone here keen to work on some OpenCV projects? I’d like to build a weeder that can do in row weeding by recognising the plants and weaving in between them, but I think I’d need a support network to bounce ideas off.
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In 2018 (before I knew of AOG) I worked on a DIY vision (OpenCV) autosteer project as part of a small group for our 4th year engineering capstone project. The project was basically a servo motor with friction wheel mounted to the steering column, a webcam mounted to the front of the tractor, and a DIY tablet containing a touch screen, raspberry Pi, arduino nano, and a motor driver. I took several vision processing classes during that time.
This project was September-April and was meant to follow rows of corn. Obviously there isn’t much corn grown during that time period in North America. We no-tilled some corn in October and took a bunch of video footage with an ATV of driving through the corn field to gather data for processing before the snow came. I have about a terabyte of that data if you want it and have a way for me to get it to you. I’ll post some stills later. I’m sure it’ll be the wrong angle for you but maybe I can put together a nice sample for you to play with.
We were able to demonstrate that the tractor/camera could follow lines painted on the road, and we were able to demonstrate that our vision algorithm produced the same kind of cross track error information when we fed it our corn data. We were never able to field test it and it definitely wasn’t at all field ready, but the basic systems were successfully demonstrated.
The algorithm was not much more than filter the feed to a specific colour, create a histogram of interesting pixels in the x direction, find the median of the histogram. I can’t remember which colour space we ended up using but using the correct space was key to success.
I think cultivator shifting to keep the cultivator on the row is quite expensive to purchase from manufacturers and I think it would not be very difficult to DIY.
Since 2018 I have only worked with vision in industrial automation settings, I have not touched OpenCV since then.
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