I am using Squeak to control a robot, specifically a RoboMagellan outdoor navigating robot. Pretty soon it will be important to confront how to implement the computer vision on this robot. The OS is Linux.
One way to do this is to use an external vision system such as RoboRealm running under MS Windows and communicate between the Squeak controller and the vision system with sockets. I'll probably do something like that but it's only a short-term solution. RoboRealm is a proprietary, closed-source application that won't be able to do something I'll want to do, perhaps something like figuring out how far the robot travels between video frames by comparing the movement of "interest points". At that point I will want some type of vision or imaging library directly accessible to Squeak. Python has an imaging library called Python Imaging Library. This is one of the strongest justifications some people use to write their entire robot code in Python in the first place. Likewise, Python has the SciPy library, which provides a large set of tools for signal and image processing, as well as linear algebra, optimization, statistics and so forth. For example, suppose I wanted to write a Kalman or other probabilistic filter for "fusing" inputs from a cameras, inertial sensors, wheel encoders and so forth. In Python, the matrix operations for doing the math would be simple calls. How would you approach these imaging and quasi-scientific issues in Squeak? Would you always end up using external packages and making interfaces to them through sockets or through special primitives in a custom VM? Thanks for your thoughts. - Robert _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners