So a simple obvious idea one of my teammates came up with, during/after (can't remember) one of our regional, was to put a cross-hair on the camera feed, instead of relying on some half put together camera tracking, luck, or skill. The issue we had though was our camera is not centered to our shooter and i actually side-mounted on our turret. Creating the cross-hairs in code seemed like too much much work (seeing how an image overlay of cross-hairs didn't seem like it would be sufficient at the time), so with that in mind I put the idea to rest.
Recently I revisited the idea, with some prompting from that teammate. With some geometry I was able to calculate curved lines, that could overlay the camera feed, that represented where the robot would be aimed (In relationship to a certain destination, e.g. the top goal) on the camera image dependent upon its distance (horizontally). I was then able to place cross-hairs on certain distances of the graph that our robot had preset powers to shoot from.
This was my result:
http://imgur.com/uMOnz
Have any other teams worked with this idea before? I'm sure there have been, how did concepts like this work for you?
__________________
2012: Buckeye Regional, Queen City Regional, Human Player
2013: Queen City Regional, Buckeye Regional, Crossroads Regional
Shooter Operator
2014: Crossroads Regional, Queen City Regional
Catapult Operator
2015: Georgia Southern Classic Regional (Winner), Queen City Regional
Chainsaw Operator
Want to talk? TeamSpeak: team3266.noip.me