"Arnie P." - A Robot Golfing System Using Binocular And A Heuristic Feedback Mechanism

This paper describes a robot vision golfing system. The Automated Robotic Navigational unit with Intelligent Eye and Putter (ARNIE P)^τproject was initiated to investigate the problems and develop software solutions for robotic tasks that require good hand-eye coordination and an intelligent sensor feedback mechanism. This system has only one frame buffer and no specialized hardware, so quasi-real time 3D tracking is accomplished in software using the Unix Spline facility. The single frame buffer and digitizer, stores and retains the location of the ball from two separate cameras during the time interval between the golf ball initially crossing a trigger scan line and the ball coming to a complete stop. The most novel aspect of this study is that by attempting to build or model a difficult perceptory task such as golf, which requires integrating many complicated computational pieces (binocular stereo vision, robot arm motion, heuristic feedback, learning), it appears to be a good plarform to experiment with artificial intelligence techniques and robotics.