Purr-Patrol-Turret

Purr Patrol Turret is a robotics project designed to detect and deter pets (primarily cats) from tampering with hazardous houseplants using a blast of water. It originally began as a class project for my AI Robotics course but was never fully realized due to time and hardware constraints.

It integrates a simple turret system with an infrared camera running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano running locally on a Raspberry Pi using a webcam, a client-server model that sends image captures to a desktop PC's Flask server connected via LAN, and advanced tracking and targeting using object detection and classification networks running on CUDA.

The camera system identifies pets and plants within a scene, detects overlap of bounding boxes of pets and plants that happens when pets start tampering with plants, targets the center of their bounding box, and activates a precision jet of water from a sprayer.

Though the project has been extended to the point that nothing remains, it was originally based on HackerShackOfficial's Tracking-Turret repository that triggered an airsoft turret based on simple motion detection.

Features

The turret system has 4 primary modes of operation:

• instance segmentation - the primary mode advertised for this project, this searches for the overlap of pets and plants using an instance segmentation model and performs targeting and fires (with a delay) on the center of their bounding box intersection
• motion detection - fires indiscriminately on motion detection found by calculating the difference in contours in a still frame over time; this is used as the alarm to trigger the instance segmentation model
• interactive - controlled by keyboard input, allowing a user to manually move the turret and fire when the "safety" settings are off
• calibration - essentially the same as the interactive mode without firing capability; the user must center the turret upon its first use in a new location to set the default position; positioning data is saved to JSON

NOTE: Plans are in place to allow for some flexibility in specifying the object classes to be targeted and for setting other parameters via CLI/YAML input

Install Guide

!! UNDER CONSTRUCTION !!

HackerShackOfficial's (Mostly) Original Instructions:

How to set up I2C on your Raspberry Pi

Install the Adafruit stepper motor HAT library.

sudo pip install git+https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Motor-HAT-Python-Library

Create and activate virtual environment.

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/eskutcheon/Purr-Patrol-Turret.git

Navigate to the directory

cd Purr-Patrol-Turret

Additional Instructions

1. Install requirements for the Raspberry Pi and primary desktop PC respectively via

    pip install -r requirements_rpi.txt
    pip install -r requirements_pc.txt

Setting Parameters

The turret system has a couple parameters that can be set from the config.py file:

### User Parameters ###
MOTOR_X_REVERSED = False
MOTOR_Y_REVERSED = False
MAX_STEPS_X = 30
MAX_STEPS_Y = 15
RELAY_PIN = 22
#######################

Running the Turret

!! UNDER CONSTRUCTION !!