Some say there’s no treasure quite as valuable as the almighty dollar. [Norbert Zare] likes alt-rock soundtracks on Youtube videos and robots obsessed with money, so set about building the latter.
The project is fundamentally a simple one. A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is outfitted with a Pi Camera, and set up to control twin servo motors attached to a simple pan/tilt assembly. The Pi runs OpenCV set up in a face-tracking mode. This allows the robot to readily track money in its field of view, as the vast majority of money out there has someone’s face on it. OpenCV is used to detect where the money is in the field of view, and guide the Pi’s camera towards the cash.
It’s a neat repurposing OpenCV’s face detection algorithm, and that’s much faster than training your own money-tracking system. However, it seems like the robot would also track regular human faces, too. Perhaps it could be optimised to do a color check, such that only greyscale or green faces were followed by the robot.
Does the project do anything useful or important? Arguably no, but if a robot can be this obsessed with money, perhaps we all can learn something. Alternatively, it might just have served as a useful project for [Norbert] to learn about programming and mechatronics projects. Either way, we dig it. Code is on Github for the curious.
Using OpenCV in this way has become common over the years. If you want to detect cats, however, maybe consider giving Tensorflow a try. Video after the break.
Euro’s don’t have faces on them.
They just have ugly bridges.
Before the Euro’s we had beautiful banknotes here in the Netherlands. Lighthouses, Snipes and other birds.
Gosh, It’s only now that I realize that those ugly bridges were probably a metaphor for “building bridges” in the EU and are supposed to imply some sort of connectedness.
Weird. Even spelling correction tries to turn it into “disconnectedness”.
And some citizens of the Netherlands took this “building bridges” way to literal and build all this fictional ugly bridges across one river.
I am just happy that it happened in the Netherlands.
Most of the world that does have faces on their money has them in more colours than just green.
Yes, American money is weird that way. To get this project to distinguish the value of the bill would take some work, anywhere in the world, maybe a line or two of code.
Most countries that have faces on their money have them in more colours than just green. And absent hair or makeup (not uncommon) most people are monochrome, inhabitants of the planet Cheron notwithstanding.
Hey, don’t call my wife a robot! no, wait.. she is good at counting money and .. yup, carry on.