This project was an excuse for me to play with Object Detection and the Coral edge TPU. The brains of the system consisted of a raspberry pi 4, coral usb accelerator and a pi camera. I followed the pan tilt tracking example from Leigh Johnson but adapted hardware to handle higher loads associated with moving a nerf blaster.

I also used a large servo pan tilt kit, a wireless relay similar to a garage door remote attached to the blaster and multiple batteries to power everything.

The system actually does a decent job of tracking a person, face, or other label in the TFlite labels library for object detection. Its a little slow and needs some tuning, but I'm sure someone that actually knows software engineering (not me) could make it work a lot better. The structure could also be improved if higher angular travel rates were implemented.