Camera Bandwidth Constrains

[asteb27]

This year, we decided to try to use roborealm and an axis camera to auto target. We ran roborealm on our drivers station and had the camera stream over the radio. However, we ran into bandwidth problems even though our camera was configured to be well within the bandwidth constraints FIRST has provided. We were forced to lower resolution and frame rate, and increase compression in order to maintain the stream. Have any other teams experienced similar issues, or is it just us?
If you have had to take such measures, how have you dealt with the blurry images?

[Joe Ross]

Did you ever measure the bandwidth (https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/3120/m/8559/l/95886-measuring-bandwidth-usage)?

What settings did you have trouble with? What settings worked?

[thecakeisalie]

Hi,
we are running at roughly ~100kb/s or 0.8 mbps which is well within the range of the 6mbps bandwith allocation they have given. The FMS guy at TCNJ and Seneca both asked us to drop the framerate and compression to this level which made calculating distance almost impossible to do on the driver station.
Currently we are debating whether or not we should move vision processing to an onboard laptop, but this also has disadvantages. Our other option is to trust that they will fix the network problems for championships so that we can bump the resolution up a notch.
Preferably, we would like to do our vision processing on the driver station, but I doubt the issues with the network will be fixed, which is why we are asking other teams how they are dealing with such issues for ideas on how to solve this dilemma.

[JesseK]

We were running at a total of 5 Mbps in DC and told to lower it since it increases the trip times (latency/lag) of your robot. Our image feed isn't crucial to our vision, so we didn't have a problem with it. On the other hand, lowering it did allow us to upgrade our telemetry update rates, which we'll play around with at Champs.