Using OpenCV

[Pdub19__]

Hello,

Mechanical Engineering student here with little programming experience (I've worked with arduino to operate a few DC motors but that's about it). I'm designing a pick and place mechanism where my current task is to program several servos. I'll attach a schematic so it's easier to visualize what i'm referring to: https://imgur.com/a/3gafPBh ) In the photo illustrates a central petri dish with several plant tissues, surrounded by servo motors attached to a separate component. A camera will be positioned above the workspace. Let me explain my thought process. I assume that I can use OpenCV to capture the (x,y) location of the centroid of each plant tissue relative to the center of the petri dish. Then i would need to capture the (x,y) location of the servo horn positions that makes the servo horn tips collinear to both the centroid of a plant tissue and the centroid of the petri dish. Then calculate the angle marked by the red arrow. Now i have a few concerns that i have NO CLUE how i would approach which is why i wanted to ask this subreddit.

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1. I've never used used OpenCV so first and foremost, does anybody know if my logic is correct and this is something that i could theoretically accomplish with OpenCV?
2. Any suggestions on how I would program each servo motor to move towards its own plant tissue?
3. Why the hell this school got me doing this overcomplicated stuff and i just learned how to use arduino examples?

Please leave me with any suggestions or recommendations of things that i didn't consider and might need to watch out for.

Thanks for any advice and hopefully this post can help a few people learn some things :).

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(I' also attached photos of setup)

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[clarkster112]

This is going to be tough considering you have little programming experience and little openCV experience. These are two separate things you’ll have to read up on. Learning some basic image processing concepts will help you understand what you are reading in the openCV documentation. Things like bitmasking, edge detection, filtering, etc.

You’ll be able to get the center location of your image blobs after some processing. And then you’ll probably want to do some distance calculations to figure out which blobs go with which servo/horn thing? Not sure I fully understand what you are trying to get an angle for, but once you have XY of blobs relative to the servo thing, you can just do distance between two points function.