Kinect usage at competitions
 

Is anyone here using the kinect at competitions? I wasn't too surprised to not see anyone use it at the week 1 event I worked at, but I figure that some teams would start using it by now. If you are do you mind sharing how you are using it?

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

I saw only one team using it at Lake Superior, but then I was only watching (from the floor) during our team's matches and some of elims.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

We used it at the Rutgers MAR event, I don't know if any other teams did. Didn't have to debate who got the station though :)

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

I attempted to help our team set it up to be used at Traverse City, however, and we were even given some time on the field during lunch to test it (because there were problems the first day with us using a USB hub, apparently that was not working with the extra cable length, we were unable to test during it on setup night) (I'd like to thank the field personnel for trying to accommodate us setting it up).

However, I was severely disappointed in how it functioned, and I can't say for sure if it was due to the setup at the field or just the Kinect in general, but this is what I was seeing:

Reliability: I was frequently seeing a loss of the control enable signal (button 9) which indicates that the users arms are in valid position (extended in the same xy plane). I am a bit suspicious that this could be due to cable length.

Sensitivity: The controls I had setup the robot to use (left/right leg forward/backward) seemed extremely sensitive, making them essentially impossible to control. Depending on the posture I stood with, I would see the buttons for leg forward/backward activating sporadically.

Speed: Our driver station (not a classmate, but it had an atom) was abysmal for controlling using the kinect, it was processing 4 or 5 FPS max. We had to setup my programming laptop to get decent results (which left me unable to make programming changes outside of extended periods of downtime) and was draining the battery much more quickly, so we eventually were going to need an external power supply installed on the field.

Height: I'm about 6' with long arms, and the Kinect was barely able to pickup my elbows while I stood in the box.

The above issues pretty much killed all excitement about using the Kinect for me. When you can't drive the robot correctly because control is constantly cutting out, and the robot is picking up different gestures based on you slightly changes in stance, and it's not picking up your full range of motion...

I wanted to try out using different gestures for control (legs and head to the sides instead of legs forward/back, along with some logic to continue the last input when the control enable signal vanishes), but if that doesn't work I feel I will need to recompile the KinectServer in order to get it to be less sensitive.

All of this combined with the fact that we were doing really well in standard autonomous, kinda made me think it wasn't really worth fussing with anymore.
I'm hoping to do some off season projects with it once we can permanently unbag the robot, but until then there are lots more things to worry about.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

We will be using it at the Los Angeles regional this weekend, mostly to delay/activate our launcher to ensure we deconflict with other teammate's autonomous modes. I saw too many shots miss in Week 1 because 2 balls were trying to enter the 3-point target at the same time.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

Team 1912 Combustion will be using it at the Bayou Regional this week. Hopefully it works..

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

A couple of teams at Alamo and a couple of teams at FLR. All it's really good for is taking up floor space.
It's a joke.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

Team 23 used the kinect at the WPI regional. I believe it was used to tip the bridge.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

It's a novel implement and does have some legitimate uses (see HOTs recent technical design whitepaper) but using it for main control in Hybrid mode is hardly better/more reproducible than a sheer open-loop implementation in all but the simplest of autonomous routines.

We might play with it a bit offseason in case it is legal for use again, perhaps to use it in a way similar to HOT.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

Only saw one team using it at ON GTR East Regional, and that was only for one round. It kind of didn't seem to do anything.

I'm thinking someone should just like breakdance in the Kinect Station. You'd get massive street cred.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

We joked around about having our human player go in and pretend to shoot baskets while the robot ran autonomous, but decided we didn't want to accidentally misrepresent ourselves to the judges :p

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

When I saw the teams using the Kinect I couldn't tell if they were doing anything effective. You might as well clown around with it.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

I've only seen a team use it once every 3-5 matches on the webfeeds I've been watching.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

We gave serious thought to juggling balls. But then figured that the balls would be ruled illegal.

Re: Kinect usage at competitions
 

Yeah refs are trained to not have a sense of humor about things like that.