As I have searched the net for weeks, it seems there are only two similar projects done before. First, it's "Snooker machine" by Professor Koorosh Khodabandehloo, university of Bristol (UK) at 1988. This is too old to count on, and unfortunetely there is no link to find professor khodabandehloo. I have no idea where he is now, and seems no one knows.
The second, is "Robotic Image Processing Pool Player" (RIPPP) by Josh Richmond and Jim Green, which have been BSc students at Waterloo university, Canada. I have traced Mr. Richmond and Green, but unfortunetly I couldn't have managed to find an email address of them yet. I think this might be a great help if I find one of them and ask to know if there is any document of that project.


posted by M at 12:34 AM

This weblog dedicates to my MS project. I think this might be a good idea to have some daily notes about it's improvement step by step. The exact title of the project is: "Hustler, a billiard machine". Of course billiard is a general term and to be more specific, this will be a snooker machine because of some technical reasons, mainly the machine vision.
The main goal of the project is to design and implement a gantry robot (a robot which its arm'sposition is determined by moving on two axis, X and Y) with ability to play snooker with an acceptable skill. The main characteristics are:
1- To detect the position of balls on the table (afterward called "pool").
2- To choose the best ball to be the target ball. Probably a fuzzy algorythm has to determine shuch a ball among all the balls in the pool.
3- To move the actuator arm right above the pitock (the white ball), set the angle and the power of the shot, and also the place on the pitock which is desired to be hit by the stick.
4- To detect any fault by the opponent, and calculate the scores.

I'll write more about it, the current ideas I have, the challenges and the problems I will probably face to.

posted by M at 7:28 AM