Target following?

Is there any way to track an object easily? ie, an IR beacon? I want to have a wheeled bot track and follow my cat. My cat is getting fat and I want a good way to motivate her!

Thanks for any suggestions.

Place an IR LED beacon on your cat's collar and localize on that?

But how does one localize/track the beacon?

One would need a sensor array to detect and measure the location of the emitter. And these sensors would need to be arranged such that you have guaranteed line of sight to the emitter, and the bot would need sensors to avoid obstacles to navigate toward the goal. Very complicated. I work for a company that engineers large-scale metrology instruments for similar problems on the scale of 1/4 million.

On a more psychological note, wouldn't you rather exercise your cat with a carrot rather than a stick? Or to use a parallel... use a mouse rather than a dog.

You may want to take a look at Roborealms. "Easy" to use image processing software

I've done this with a pc and webcam.

Or you could use an IR Detector placed inside of a short length of opaque tube. When the bot does not detect the IR strobe, it rotates until it does, then drives forward until the IR strobe again is not detected. You can enrich the scheme then by placing two more sensors to the left and right of the "center" sensor. This will tell you which direction the strobe was traveling when it left the center sensor's field of view, and therefore you know which direction to turn to reacquire it.

Once completed you will need to build another robot that will remove the cat turd from inside your slippers :wink: