[Justin Buist]

GRIP is kind of handy for getting started with vision processing. Slap a USB camera into a laptop running GRIP and you can start working through some basic transformations and watch what they do visually. Grab an image, apply an HSV threshold, find conturs, and then check out what they look like.

You'll want to get a light ring around your camera to hit the retroreflective tape and make it all appear like one easily identifiable color. Green is popular because red and blue lights will be on the field and your robot can get confused by them. This year 4003 is experimenting with IR light to avoid any confusion with visible light sources. Kinda neat.

Edited to add: Once you get a handle on what OpenCV can do through GRIP then you can either have it generate code for you (never tried that, it's new this year) or just figure out how to code it up yourself. Once you start getting the lingo of OpenCV it's pretty easy.