Master's students from EPFL put their programming skills to the test and see who wins in an AI race. They programmed their robots to identify certain images which when recognized the robots will start to follow.
“We had to program our robot to recognize a visual signal captured by an embedded camera and then follow the signal. That required developing our own algorithm and programming it in the robot,” says Rayan Abi Fadel, a student in the College of Management of Technology.
To make things fair, all the students used the same robot and the same base algorithm which was developed by PhD students, Yuejiang Liu and George Adaimi. However, the students may change and fine-tune the algorithm with their own tweaks.
“For example, since we wanted our robot to follow an object while the student holding it was running, we artificially blurred the background of the images used to train the robot, to simulate the effect of rapid movement.”
(Image credit: Jamani Caillet/EPFL)