In a day you don’t cross problems, you can be sure you are traveling the wrong path- Swami Vivekananda.
As an electronics engineer I was always interested in creating gadgets that can enhance the human experience. Augmenting human senses by creating devices that can act as an interface for an enhanced sensory experience has been a long standing goal of engineering. We as humans have been provided with a limited slice of reality that can be perceived with natural faculties. However it is only when we try to understand the intricacies of each sense and its interpretation by the brain that we may really appreciate the senses that we otherwise take for granted.
It is quite easy for a human child to recognize and differentiate two different coloured balls. But how do you explain it to a computer that is receiving an electrical form of an optical signal from a camera. Understanding not just the best way to clear out the clutter from the background but also code a method to perpetually do this in real time so a robot may actually find out the coloured ball in any background and follow it if it was moved by scanning its environment. The scan part was easy but the main problem was colours do not appear in natural light as just a single shade but rather a complex mixture of various shades at each subsequent pixel. So a red ball in natural light will also be black and white at different points depending on how the light falls on its spherical surface. One thing was now clear that instead of a particular colour, a range must be used for easier interpretation by the code that we had written. Next came the part of eliminating the unnecessary data to minimize the data volume that would need to be processed in real time. The solution to this problem came in the form of a bright insight after hours of thought followed by sleep only to wake up with a possible solution. Chromatic disintegration of each frame into the colour of interest and everything else. Eliminating the everything else part and only processing the position of the object of interest in the frame and send feedback movement commands to the robot’s motors such that the robot moves towards the ball. When the robot finally did what we wanted it to do I felt a sense of contentment of creating my own electronic baby.