There's Waldo, A Clever Robot Specifically Designed to Answer the Age Old Question of 'Where's Waldo'

There’s Waldo is a very clever robot that is able to search through many illustrated faces to find the often elusive Waldo of the classic game “Where’s Waldo“, indicating the location with a pointed robotic finger. The robot then sends a picture to a trained machine to verify the location of iconic red-striped shirt wearer. Once confirmed, then There’s Waldo answers that age old question. The fastest speed attained finding Waldo was 4.5 seconds in test runs. The entire machine uses UARM Metal from the PYARM Python library and is controlled by Raspberry Pi.

Once initialized the arm is instructed to extend and take a photo of the canvas below. It then uses OpenCV to find and extract faces from the photo. The faces are sent to the Google Auto ML Vision service which compares each one against the trained Waldo model. If a confident match of 95% (0.95) or higher is found the robot arm is instructed to extend to the coordinates of the matching face and point at it. If there are multiple Waldos in a photo it will point to each one.