[mikegrundvig]

In our experience the built-in Kinect laser is not powerful enough to get good images in a light-noisy environment at any useful distance by itself. We've tested that quite a bit and even in the evening in an open area we started getting image quality problems quite quickly. We also tried using the LED ring light from AndyMark - it worked fine in a dark area to about 20 feet, but it a really bright env, it was overpowered by ambient light very quickly. I imagine in a bad env. it will become less effective very quickly. We've already ordered 850 and 830nm IR LEDs to see how well we can boost the initial image quality distance. We've also ordered some visible LEDs as well to see which camera/light combo gives us the most reliable initial image for processing.

As for the rest of the stuff, we are using RoboRealm to handle image processing and edge detection. The students were able to get a great set of edges with that in literally less than an hour. It's a really impressive piece of software and is clearly going to be the linchpin for our vision system.

-Mike