Laser Tower

The laser tower of death (torreta láser de la muerte) is a turret that aims at targets of different colours, soda cans in principle, and shoots them, at least virtually. I built it in 2014 with David Estévez and Roberto Herrera, as the project for the Computer Vision course of my master’s in robotics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

The original idea was a turret that actually shot at things. Somewhere along the project we came to the conclusion that building a machine that fires at everything in front of it could be slightly dangerous, especially since, during the tests, its aim wasn’t always very accurate. So it got a laser instead.

The turret

It’s a pan-tilt with a webcam on top, so the camera always looks where the turret is pointing. These are the components:

• Camera: Logitech C270 HD
• Servos: 2x Hitec HS-805BB+
• Controller: Arduino UNO
• Power supply: 12 V 2 A adapter

The parts were designed in OpenSCAD and printed in ABS on my own printer, a Prusa Air 2. The whole thing is mounted on a tripod.

Software

Both the camera and the Arduino are connected to a computer that runs a Python program. It finds the targets in the image by their colour and uses visual servoing to move the servos and aim at them. David wrote a detailed explanation of the software on his wiki at the time, but sadly it’s no longer online.

Here it is in action:

The printable parts and the code are in the project repository on GitHub.