Logo Turtle is dead... Long live CARMA... the Car-park Attendant Robot (Model A)
The world's first robotic car-park attendant. The robot will perform circuits of a car-park and, by means of a camera, read the number plates of the cars that are parked there. It will then be able to identify cars which have exceeded their time limit, or cars which are not authorised to park in the car park. It will be completely wireless, communicating to a centrally placed base-station via a bluetooth link.
This idea extends to a more general image-recognition problem which could be used in different applications. For example, an automatic robotic shopper which can distinguish between different products and brands by looking at their labels.
The following tasks are required to allow the robot to identify number plates.
If the registration number extraction program is to be run on the base-station rather than the robot we will also need to implement transmission of images from the robot to the base-station.
The following tasks are required to enable the robot to make circuits of the car park of its own accord.
Finally we must implement a scheme to identify registrations that have been in the car-park for too long, or are not authorised to be there at all. (Using a database??) We must also decide on an appropriate action to be taken and implement it - one suggestion is to SMS message a human attendants mobile phone.