Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

UDPDump just prints everything it sees on port 1155

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

Why not? That is what we do with the Bridges now. Take hardware designed to sit on a shelf and put it in the very demanding environment of a FRC robot.





We all know how well that works :rolleyes:

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

won't this make the coach not being able to control the robot a borderline call? i mean, they would have to be in the field of view in most set ups

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

That's what I was thinking, kind of like how auto mode ran in 2008, more human interaction.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/press...inect-for-2012
;)

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

A good benefit of the kinect on the driver station side might be creating a map of the field and knowing where all the other bots are during the competition. To do this youd have to track each bot as it moves. It would be a daunting task, but could be done. I believe the field is the main obstacle around this though. The terrain will greatly affect what the kinect will see as well as the height of the kinect. Id like to see this done. If I had the resources right now. Id do it myself based off of last years game, but I dont own my own field sadly haha.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

I'd like to think that it's a simple answer: They are giving you a Kinect, and what you do with it will be up to you, worth an award and probably special recognition.

The quote "While the focus for Kinect in 2012 is at the operator level" is very important, as I'm sure it has more to do about the Kinect's slogan "You are the controller" than it is about making a robot mechanism. However, as it doesn't say use of the Kinect on the robot is prohibited, I will venture a guess that if you only get one Kinect from the Kit of Parts and you can use it on your robot rather than the 'focus', then the whole use of the Kinect is optional.

If the Kinect is optional, it will most likely be for the "Human player", or "Human Dancer", or "Actor", however it can be just as simple as you are given a Kinect, and whatever you want to do with it is up to you.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

From the above mentioned article:

"In the 2012 FIRST Robotics Competition, teams will be able to control robots via Kinect. They will be able to either program their robots to respond to their own custom gestures made by their human teammates, or use default code and gestures. The added ability for teams to customize the application of the Kinect sensor data is a valuable enhancement to the FRC experience."

Just to spell it out further.
;)

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

The Kinect is allot of tech rolled up into a 150$ consumer device. One of the side effects of bring it into that price point is the camera is marginal. Teams should explore the camera's tolerance of bad lighting. The Miss Daisey crew should have good tracking at Ramp Riot. However there are other venues that have terrible lighting in the driver area.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

I think the interference point is a good one (and probably a showstopping one as far as competition goes), but if you want to run the kinect on a robot, you could certainly stick a laptop on a robot and attach the kinect to it for some fun in-lab demos. Network communication via unix sockets with the cRio is actually very easy in c++.

So it'd be something like this:
Kinect->usb->Laptop that can talk to it
Laptop->ethernet->cRio

The laptop could do continuous transmission of the depth and picture images to the crio, or could do processing and just send the results.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

Kinect API has several features. It is a USB color camera, directional microphones, a servo for adjusting it's orientation, and finally, a patterned light IR transmitter and IR camera. The skeleton tracking is accomplished by heavy processing of the depth map calculated from the patterned light. Since it brings it's own light source, it even works in the dark. The Kinect can be configured to not even return the color image, and the skeleton will still work. Oddly colored clothes aren't required, but the shouldn't hurt either.

Does at answer a few questions?

Greg McKaskle

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

I was late to the meeting tonight and did not see it but, one of our programmers brought his Kinect in tonight with some software off the net. The general consensus was "Yeah we can do something with this". Tracking was very good even with marginal warehouse lighting. Team is excited with the new allowed toy.

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

Am I the only one who hopes that they add C# support to their current list of programming languages? :P

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

Maybe Microsoft is giving us a special type of kinect. Maybe it's one that is going to plug into the usb on the computor, and have a seprate sensor box to go on the robot that recieves a signal put out from the connect. Or i could just be shouting nonsense. ::rtm::

Re: How are they going to use Kinect?
 

Ask one of the beta teams that received them. They already have them.