Using YOLOv8 – an object recognition model

Before we dive into the details of the YOLOv8 model, let’s talk about why I selected it. First of all, the learning process is pretty much the same for any CNN we might use. YOLO is a strong open source object detection model with a lot of development behind it. It’s considered state of the art, and it already does what we need – it detects objects and shows us where they are in images by drawing bounding boxes around them. So, it tells us what objects are, and where they are located. As you will see, it is very easy to use and can be extended to detect other classes of objects other than what it was originally trained for. There are a lot of YOLO users out there who can provide a lot of support and a good basis for learning about AI object recognition for robotics.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, we have two tasks we need to accomplish to reach our goal of picking up toys with a robot. First...