Engineer Mark Rober
Fond of playing darts but simply cannot hit the target?
Never miss it anymore with this special dartboard.
In every attempt, the dartboard adjusts itself so that you can hit the bullseye. It is so smart that it can predict the movement of your every throw in a fraction of a second while it moves quickly to meet the end of your dart to the center target.
Source: Mark Rober’s YouTube
With that setup, the dartboard system has two key parts: one is the ability to predict where a dart is going to land with a typical throw from a regulated distance, which is done within 200 milliseconds; and two is the movement of the board to the predicted location in time for the landing.
An infrared motion capture system tracks the movement of the dart through the air to predict where it will land. It picks up tiny retro-reflectors that line the specially-designed dart.
Its maker California-based ex-NASA engineer Mark Rober, explained on YouTube, “As humans, we can see in 3D because we have two eyes and our brains calculate the differences between the two images and then tells us how far and close things are. That’s why when you close one eye, you instantly lose that depth perception.
“That’s basically what we’re doing here except we have six eyes and each of these eyes are cameras that can take a 4k-resolution picture 260 times per second,” he added.
There are cameras that emit infrared light which hits the retro-reflectors, and the camera lens respond upon the light reflected back. This is how the motion capture system sees the dart that floats around in the air, and with the help of a software, the dartboard adjusts itself to the position of the predicted landing.
“We have the position of the dart as it moves through the air, now we use some Mat Lab code to predict where it will land and the trick here is anything you throw into the air collecting air resistance will travel in a parabola,” Rober said.
From that data and through his knowledge with the parabola, the dashboard allows itself to move up and down to chase your throw.
Source: Dailymail UK
