Optically Tracking a Robot Arm

I loved reading Tom Larkworthy’s recent post on Edinburgh (Scotland) Hacklab’s blog on his experiments with building an OSHW robot arm with a reach of 1m, positionable to within 0.1mm and able to lift up to 2kg. Rather than sourcing expensive components, Tom’s goal was to develop an optical tracking system that would allow the use of commonplace motors. In the post, he tries a couple of different techniques including edge detection of a Lego construct using VRML. Ultimately this post appears to relect Tom’s initial experiments, and he still has a lot of work ahead of him.