Continuing in my series of developments with the Mech Warfare turret, I’ve now managed to replicate the primitive target tracking functionality I had in the v2 version of the turret. This works using a pretty simple principle:
- raspicam is used to read the raspberry pi camera
- ArUco is used to find any fiducials in view
- The target closest to the center is deemed, the “active target”
- The pitch and yaw rate are set based on a simple P controller to bring that target to a known point
This works passably, as shown in the video below:
In this architecture, I have a lot of room to improve the performance, both in terms of range and tracking stability. We’ll see what I can come up in future work.