While the days of outdoor cookouts may be a few months away for most of us, that certainly leaves plenty of time to prepare for that moment. While some may spend that time perfecting recipies or doing various home improvement projects during their remaining isolation time, others are practicing their skills at the various games played at these events. Specifically, this group from [Dave’s Armory] which have trained a robot that helps play the perfect game of cornhole. (Video, embedded below.)
While the robot in question is an industrial-grade KUKA KR-20 robot with a hefty price tag of $32,000 USD, the software and control system that the group built are fairly accessible for most people. The computer vision is handled by an Nvidia Jetson board, a single-board computer with extra parallel computing abilities, which runs OpenCV. With this setup and a custom hand for holding the corn bags, as well as a decent amount of training, the software is easily able to identify the cornhole board and instruct the robot to play a perfect game.
While we don’t all have expensive industrial robots sitting around in our junk drawer, the use of OpenCV and an accessible computer might make this project a useful introduction to anyone interested in computer vision, and the group made the code public on their GitHub page. OpenCV can be used for a lot of other things besides robotics as well, such as identifying weeds in a field or using a Raspberry Pi for facial recognition.
Can anyone explain to me why this game is named corn hole?
I prefer to call it “Bean Bag Toss”.
In the Midwest, the bags are filled with corn, and you toss them at a hole.
Yeah, not being American I could only associate this with something from Beavis & Butthead. TP anyone?
Bung cornholio or something wasn’t it?
I am the great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!
On behalf of the United States of America, I’d also like to apologize to the international community because Pickleball has nothing to do with cucumbers in brine.
Because you are throwing a bag of Corn kernels at a Hole.
Because nobody wanted to say A**hole in front of Aunt Bea.
You can get a Robot arm for a few thousand dollars or less on auction
Yup. Problem is they come as is with no support. Which is ok… IF you can support it yourself. You’ll most likely have to relicense the onboard software though (I manage Fanuc paint bot at work)
I ran into a similar situation with a CNC machine. I found its best to just replace the board rather than dealing with the licensing (Which can easily run in thousands of dollars…). Especially if you can eliminate the need for a full-blown desktop-type system and instead use a small SBC.
I rehabilitated a CNC mill at work that was in really good condition and had a lot of nifty features, but required a computer that had a custom ISA card installed and running some ancient software that only ran on Windows 3.11 I replaced the whole thing with an RPi compute module, and now the machine has a shiny new sealed touch-screen monitor, and can receive G-Code off a file share on the network, rather than hoping your 5.25″ floppy wasn’t ruined from all the dust in the machine shop…
The problem with that is robots are a whole different beast. I have retrofitted CNC systems and mills and lathes are peanuts compared to a robot arm. The inverse kinematics and load calcs are a nightmare. It really is easier to just buy the whole setup and get some support.
I have programmed for an 8 axis arm (6 Axis + gantry + rotary table) and there is a good reason they charge 5-10k per year just for the CAM side of things.
You can actually get a robot + controller for a (relatively) reasonable price. It is the integration, programming, and toolpath generation that gets expensive.
Marginally less boring than playing the actual game. However, the robot fails completely at the actual purpose of the game which is drinking beer. Zero points.
You wouldn’t want the robot drinking your beer, now would you?
No, but it could pour it for you:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v6WyOv3OP4A
Presumably one could play the game with a cheaply built PVC air cannon, right?
Coupled with the CV enhanced target board mentioned on HaD a while back.
It’s not cheating if you either built or programmed the robot!