Open-source project Pixy aims to give vision to hobbyists' robots

An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects. The Pixy camera sensor board, being developed by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University, can detect objects based on seven colors, and then report them back to a computer. A Kickstarter campaign was launched on Thursday to fund the $25,000 project, and the organizations are on pace to reach full funding by the end of the day. Adding the Pixy could be viewed as giving robots basic vision, said Rich LeGrand, founder of Charmed Labs. "Once you have vision, then you can introduce the idea of tasks," LeGrand said. "If you want a robot to charge itself, that's a simple example of a task.