What does your camera do?
 

I've seen varied responses out of different people's camera systems. After you vote, please tell what you extrapolate from the camera data (i.e. run a turret yaw, shooter pitch, shooter speed,...).

Re: What does your camera do?
 

fritzes out and causes a 1.5 sec delay on all controls . .

but before it did that it controlled the speed of our shooter and our turret

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Our camera controls our pan and tilt for our turret and also controls the distance we travel when using our shooting autonomous.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

The poll is up now. sorry for the delay.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Do a little dance...
Make a little love...
Get down tonight...
Get down tonight...

Sorry, just had to get that out.

Anyways our CMU camera controlled both pan and tilt for our shooter. When it was working, it was great, but sometimes it decided to "get jiggy with it" and refused to work properly. Good times.

"Its locked on. I think."
(waves hand in front of lens)
"Nevermind, its not locked on"

or better yet

"Searching... searching... Its got it! Wait, now its searching... searching.."

Also, we have Mark Leon quoted reffering to our robot as "The CMU cam: Its just that easy"

Mike C.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

During part of the build season, we had the opposite problem. I quote:

"Ok turn it on. (CLUNK, fans spin up) Searching...... ok it found the lights on the ceiling again." :ahh:

But I don't mean to hurt the little guy's feelings. We have come sooo far since a few months ago. Camera works awesome now, has been treating us well since the season started and continues to. :D

-Q

Re: What does your camera do?
 

We have our camera working, we used it in conjunction with a HUD to give the driver pretty accurate alignment directions (via LEDs in the glasses).

Re: What does your camera do?
 

If the target was within a 40 degree window our camera would lock on. Our whole robot was the turret :rolleyes: Once locked on, the program would take over the shooting.
The camera team was outstanding.
One of our students found a solution to the 'lock on any light source' syndrome. He programmed the camera to ONLY lock on the green light. It was so good that you could pass a lighted fluorescent work light in front of the target and the camera would ignore it. It showed up as a black band. As a safety bonus, we could only shoot with a good lock. Thus we would not shoot into the crowd or at the judges :ahh:
Also, at our playing field, we had pieces of tape laid out on the floor for every 5 degrees of camera-to-target tilt. We than programmed our shooter for each increment to shoot into the center of the goal. This way the program would vary the speed of our shooter to shoot into the goal at any angle. We used a gear tooth sensor to keep the speed constant. We could shoot while moving forward and while stationary. We were working on a program to shoot while moving backwards.
Work great!

Re: What does your camera do?
 

We gave a valiant effort to get our camera working. There was a lot of code written before we came to the conclusion that it was simply not reliable enough to take control of the robot for shooting. We ended up just coding up a PID loop similar to our original plan, except using the gyroscope to hold a heading. (We even got the Radioshack Innovation in Control award for it at Palmetto)

Ideally I wanted to use the two in concert to hold a heading, and adjust that heading depending on feedback from the camera. Oh well, I can dream can't I?

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Our camera controlled shooter speed and turret position, plus in autonomous it would control firing (since it would not fire until the turret was in position). Once we worked out all our problems with the turret wiggling we got the camera to work well enough that I shot blindly with 1 or 2 robots in the way of my view and would make over half the shots, unfortunately it took us until Saturday morning to get it working right.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

We had ours working great, but mechanical issues made it difficult to test. :D

It took all the practice matches and the first day of competition to get it honed in, however. We had "shooter creep" (the PD loop compensating for more balls being fed through by increasing shooter speed).

Re: What does your camera do?
 

We have our new programmer working on getting around to learning about the camera by next January. He figured out limit switches and ultrasound this afternoon.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

If he needs help I'm sure he can inquire anywhere in the programming forums here, or he can contact our team or other willing bodies out here in AZ.

Did anyone have any terrible accidents with the camera this year, like tracking something in the stands and shooting bystanders?

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Yes, herd about it and have seen it live. No one gets hurt though, the speed limit keeps it down. Once I was in the stands and caught a ball from a robot. :rolleyes:

Our vision and tracking system actually ended up working much better than expected. Our operator now has very little to do, since they have never used manual shooting during a match yet. :D Won't explain my whole program or anything, but all i can say is that the whole system working together targets very well under pressure, to the point that we can recover from a defensive autonomous hit by another team.

By the way, I'm pretty good with the camera, so If you need some help with it I'd be glad to. I will be at Atlanta if you need help there as well... I'll be sorta busy there though, I have new code I've written that needs to be tested.

1501: Are you going to atlanta? You can reply here or email me, either way's fine. Thanks.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

well we have it working, but we ended up modifying our robot to shoot for the low goals, so we don't use it. It's currently on loan to team 1560. However LAST year we had it tracking and on the robot, and that was something to see.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Sorry no, we won't be making it. We all wished for the chance, but it didn't come for us this year.

We will cheer for 1024 and 461 though! Go get them guys!

Also our programming team did pretty good with the camera as well. It auto aims. If anyone needs any help or sample code, just let us know.

This video is one of the best videos that shows off taking a hit in automous, then still taking another aim, and finish out shooting.

http://www.soap.circuitrunners.com/2...n_010_bad2.wmv

We also snagged a vision tetra last year at Boilermaker. So we learned alot in TWO years about the camera as well. We are SOOOO glad the target is illuminated this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1t_WIyBBDE

-

Re: What does your camera do?
 

I didn't see a choice for "Fell off robot and got ran over" Pic 1 pic 2

Before that happen we used it for our auto mode; which if I remember correctly was to run forward (toward the center goal) and have the camera try to track and correct, if it didn't find it the robot would just shoot the balls anyway.

As for human control our copilot has the option of using an auto aim but we usually just shoot manually,I line it up and he fires.

So really we didn't use the camera all that much.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Ours didn't do much at GLR, but started pulling it's own at West Michigan.
It finds range to the target, and adjusts flywheel speeds accordingly. The camera doesn't actually move left and right, it moves the turret in the direction it wants to see. So, if we're generally pointed at the goal, the turret is always ready and aimed.

We also made a pair of HUD safety glasses with an LED on each side. The left LED indicates a solid target lock and the right LED indicates that the flywheels are at the correct speed for the distance to the target.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Ours works great. Our Turret allows the camera to keep looking at the goal. For some reason it was not performing well at Chesapeake, and later we figures that the servo was bad. We changed it and now its all ready for Nationals!

We also have a manual override on the camera, that allows the driver to move the turret up and down depending on how far away is the robot from the goal, but the camera still tracks the left or Right turn point.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Interesting story about this actually.

Our camera does nothing (nothing useful anyway), it's there and shakes like crazy when powered.

Anyway, we were doing something to our robot in the pit when we hear an announcement come over the PA. "We have a CMU cam here at the pit desk, the referees say it fell off of a robot".

Our team starts having a good laugh at the thought of another team's camera just falling off their bot during a match.

Then one of our mentors looks at our robot and says "wait a minute... where's our camera?"
Yeah..... we felt pretty awkward.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

At the Florida Regional our camera alternately danced and played dead for the entire competition. At the Palmetto Regional the camera was fairly reliable and we used it to adjust the azimuth control on our turret. At Championships I hope to get the camera working even better.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

We had the EXACT same problem. We noticed that our Tilt Servo was binding on the opposite side as the tilt servo. We stripped the gears out of the servo because of this binding. We bought a spare mount and make sure it was assembled correctly with nylon washers etc....within a few more cycles of practice rounds at our playing field, we destroyed yet another servo...Not sure what the problem is. I was hoping one of the mechnical team members could help us understand why we are tearing up the tilt servo.....

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Our tilt servo did the same thing. It would get stuck on its way upwards. We replaced it (not exactly a trivial task) at the beginning of GTR.

Re: What does your camera do?
 

Out of the two teams I mentor only 1 team has a shooter so the other didn't bother. After painful testing post-regional the camera code was finally done and working. I think compared to regionals alot of teams will have their cameras functioning in atlanta.