Pixy Is A Colour-Sensitive Vision Sensor That Gives Your Bot An Object-Tracking Eye

Computer vision technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, enabling machines to get a whole lot better at processing visual data so they can pick out specific objects from background noise, Terminator style. However crunching all that real-time visual data can require a lot of processing power. So, for lighter-weight projects, here’s a neat alternative which allows you to build a bot  or system that can identify and track objects by sensing specific colours.

Pixy is an open source vision sensor that’s already exceeded its Kickstarter funding goal of $25,000. It’s able to be fast, says its creators (Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University), because of this hue-centric approach — allowing it to send only specific coloured object visual data to the microcontroller it’s being used with, rather than outputting all visual data for image processing.

The vision sensor can track seven different colours signatures at once  – a figure that can be expanded by using combinations of colours (‘colour codes’ — basically sticking one swatch of colour next to a different one to create a combination of two or more colours) if you need to track more than seven different-coloured objects at once. The system can apparently plot and report the real-time location of “hundreds” of objects at a time, and do so at an impressive 50Hz.

Pixy processes an entire 640

Pixy Is A Colour-Sensitive Vision Sensor That Gives Your Bot An Object-Tracking Eye