[Tom Bottiglieri]

A quick note on the vision app and the motivation behind using Android.

We started the year under the mindset that we could build a protected zone shooter, but quickly realized with some prototypes and strategy sessions there was serious value to be had by building a small robot that could both go under the bar and shoot from anywhere near the tower. We knew this would require a very good vision system for our robot and got to work trying to make something to run on the NVIDIA Jetson board. This board proved to be very capable of processing frames (in fact, the best performance we got all year was an early prototype running on this board), but had some issues with power up/down reliability. We debated using a computer with a battery built in, but settled on Android because it was cheaper and "cooler".

The app was designed to work well on the hardware we selected for the robot (Nexus 5), but we have seen weird bugs on other devices. For instance, the framerate is worse and the picture is upside down on my Nexus 5X. I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable cause for this, we just haven't felt the need to fix bugs for platforms that weren't on our robot. If you find bugs in the app or make it work on a new platform, feel free to submit a pull request and our students will review it.