Tired of that smug look of satisfaction on your kid’s face when they’re able to find Waldo on a page faster than you can? A creative agency called RedPepper built a robot that levels the Where’s Waldo playing field using a camera and machine learning AI to spot the striped traveler in as little as four-and-a-half seconds. Looks like you’re out of a job, little Billy.
Once the robot arm is in place, it snaps a high-res photo of a two-page Where’s Waldo spread, and analyzes it for recognizable cartoon human faces using the OpenCV computer vision programming tools. To actually spot Waldo, the robot’s designers trained Google’s Cloud AutoML machine learning tool on a relatively small collection of 107 Waldo head and body images.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
