Auto-Targetting in a Remote Sentry TurretJacky Chang, Stephanie Paige, Eli StickgoldOctober 27, 2008The initial idea for our project was to create an auto-targetting system for a NerfVulcan, an automatic, belt-fed gun that shoots small foam darts. The weight of the Vulcan,however, makes it somewhat unfeasible to do this without spending a large amount of effortengineering a system to handle the gun’s bulk, so the plan is to do a proof of concept usinglaser pointer and small servo motors. The project is divided up into three parts: the GUI,video processing, and the actual movement module.A camera mounted below the gun will remain stationary to provide all of the footagenecessary for targetting. The plan is to have GUI that would allow users to either set theturret into an automatic shooting mode, where it would shoot at targets when it sensedmovement, or to override this and use the gun manually, directing its movement and pickingtargets using the video feed.The second module would deal with the actual video processing when the turret is inautofire mode. It would store frames of video and compare them, finding changes betweenframes and determining whether or not those changes were large enough to constitute athreat that should be shot. This module would also determine the azimuth and elevation ofthe target and feed that to the third module.The last module would turn the actual gun using the azimuth and elevation providedby the video processing module. This module would also fire the weapon once it was in1position. An additional feature that we might add would be to mount a range finder ontothe platform and use it to determin the actual distance between the laser pointer and thetarget, and use that distance to calculate the elevation a Vulcan would have to have in orderto arc the darts correctly and hit the target. Since our proof of concept is using laser pointersrather than an actual Vulcan, this feature would not be necessary in the first
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