[Bryscus]

We found last year that color tracking worked wonderfully when:

1. we overexposed the image and then froze the setting

2. also froze the white balance

The first one helps to keep the camera from going into saturation because of the brightness of the reflected light. This would cause the camera to perceive a color shift.

The second is absolutely essential when it comes to changing lighting conditions. By keeping the white balance fixed, we didn't once have to calibrate the camera at an event or even at practice. We played indoors in fluorescent lights, near sodium lights and even outdoors in daylight in a covered setting and the image processing picked out the targets every time.

We ended up not using tracking in the end only because our driver was amazing (when using our patented photon cannon) and we didn't have a turret system. Creating a controller to center the whole robot proved too daunting a task. A linear system would have been much easier to control.

- Bryce

P.S. That being said, last year we used the "Tools -> Create C Code..." option in Vision Assistant after following the Vision White Paper guidelines. We then stripped out all the extra generic code that the generator created. We ended up with nice streamlined c functions that work just like the vision assistant but didn't have all the gross overhead that the code generator created.