[faust1706]

Originally Posted by NWChen

In addition to locating other robots and field elements, you also need to know the position of your own robot, e.g. with simultaneous localization and mapping.

I don't know if you picked this up on my long post, but the method I proposed was undriven wheels with encoders or doing a pose calculation on a vision target. If you're really wondering what camera pose is....


My team last summer got a birds eye view of the object in front a kinect to work: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/39138 The next step was to implement a* path planning but we never got it to work (it is still on our to do list). (The objects in view are soccer balls, that is why they are all the same size in the top view)

On a side not. Slam is so cool. For anyone interested:

Originally Posted by yash101

This gives me another question. What does the Kinect distance map look like? How do you get the distance measurement from a single pixel?

Yash, check the dropbox (pm me your email if you want to be included into the dropbox. It has....23 sample vision programs ranging from our 2012-2014 code, to game piece detection for 2013 and 2014, to depth programming. I passed the torch of computer vision to a student who uses github, so don't be surprised if it gets switched over): TopDepthTest. It is the program that the image I linked to is from. The kinect depth map allocates distance as a pixel value (colour), for those of you who aren't aware.

Here is the code to calculate distance from the intensity of a pixel:

Scalar intensity = depth_mat2.at<uchar>(center[i]);
double distance = 0.1236 * tan(intensity[0]*4 / 2842.5 + 1.1863)*100;

center[i] is the center of a contour (object of interest that passed all of our previous tests), it has a x and y component.

The kinect is rather intensive. We ran 3 cameras this year an analysed every aspect of the game we possibly could with vision and we got 8 fps on an odroit. You'd most certainly have to have multiple on board computers to handle multiple kinects, but that may not be necessary if you only play to move forward and you don't have omnidirectional drive capabilities.

I'm waiting for the cheesy poofs to release their amazing autonomous code so I can apply it to autonomous path planning (instead of their predrawn paths)

Originally Posted by JohnFogarty

I have to say a Kinect for the first bit would not be my first choice. I got the chance to use a lydar this season and boy was it nice.

There are other alternatives to the kinect, I personally prefer the asus xtion. It is smaller, faster, and lighter.