Dear all,
I just got my H7 Plus camera last week and I’m loving it so far! I have tried the examples and wrote some small python apps to do some light work and I am very happy with it all. However, I do have a few (basic?) questions that I’d like to ask to see if what I hope to achieve is feasible or if I am too naive as a beginner.
Basically, my cat loves to play with nerf darts - the classic blue, soft darts with the orange tips that are used in nerf guns. I thought it’d be nice to create a robot that would be able to detect a nerf dart on the floor, grab it, and throw it again. Since I am new in robotics I realise it’s probably ambitious to do this as a starting project, but you never know. 
I have created photographs of the nerf darts on our carpet with the normal lighting conditions in the dark (i.e. it’s really dark). I have attached an example. (0034).
. I’d say that these kind of images are useless for any purpose so I used my phone torch to light one which gave a somewhat better result.
I have noticed that when I do it by bright daylight, the blob detection algorithm works fairly well to detect the orange tip, but somehow the blue foam doesnt respond well with the blob detection for blue (even if I used the threshold editor).
My questions would be:
- is detection of an object like this on a carpet doable? (most youtube videos with object detection are on white background)
- is it true that lighting is a very decisive factor in recognition of blobs and that I perhaps should use an 8 neopixel ring to shine light on objects?
- is it true that machine learning is probably not the way to go as this may be able to answer the question ‘is there a nerf dart in sight’ but not ‘this is where the nerf dart is’ which I will need for alignment with a robot arm?
Thanks in advance!