A new server, a new look and a return to regular service after a bit of a hiatus from blogging.

I’ve returned to my computer vision project with a vengeance and am close to having the first part working. This includes feature location and tracking between frames, 3D reconstruction and ego motion estimation. The final piece of the puzzle is my old nemesis – Non-linear Least Squares Minimisation. For this I am using the levmar library implementation of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. So far I have a partial solution in that it works well for translations, but not so well for rotations so I need to do a bit more work on that yet. Once that’s sorted the last piece of the puzzle will be implementing a kalman filter to merge the odometry data from the wheel encoders with the ego motion estimation from the vision system.

I’m simultaneously resurrecting AMI (my robotics research platform) and am working on a few upgrades for that. Getting the environment up and running was easy this time only a few hours to get the cross tool chain built and various other tools sorted and I was loading s19 records into the 68332 and seeing “Hello world!”.

I’m off to TechEd next week so that should be interesting!