Pointing at a moving object

Question

I'm a complete novice when it comes to robotics and/or computer vision, so I'm looking for a place to start - simply googling has not located what I want.

I want to build a device that continuously points at a an object that's moving in 3 dimensional space. Something like a robot shining a laser pointer at a moving quadcopter.

The target can be equipped with some sort of vision enhancement mechanism - LED blinking in a particular pattern, or displaying a particular combination, anything like that. A closed feedback loop is also possible, but seems much more complicated to implement.

I don't really care if this is done visually or through some other technology (radar?) though for a hobbyist visual seems the cheapest/easiest.

I'm not looking for a product that does this off the shelf - I'm looking for ideas on how to design such a system.

So far, I've not even been able to find what keywords to search on....

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are a wide variety of solutions to reach your "object tracking" goal. Consider using OpenCV and any of its built in methods for tracking objects. One of which is finding objects based on color. Color the object different than anything else in the field of view. Then program OpenCV to find that color and offer up that color's position. At which point it would be a matter of proper programming for the given platform to send such information to, for example, servo motors to control the camera position.