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Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
It's not a glib comment - other teams (mine included) anticipated this problem and successfully solved it. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see any questions on this forum of how to solve it or I would have explained what we do. Part of engineering is anticipating possible problems and incorporating solutions into the design. One suggestion was already made (point the camera at the ground). Our solution was to have the camera look only at the exact locations that tetras should have been found and use the virtual window function of the camera to further restrict it's view. We did not have a single problem with our vision system at the Championship. We successfully tracked the tetras and goals in every single match we played using the calibration values that FIRST provided. Since our software knew which spots the tetras were located in, we could intelligently decide which one to attempt to pick up, and in the cases where we knew that we couldn't pick up either of them (due to the robot's design and not having enough time) we instead would drive over to the autoloader so that it was ready to go when driver control started.We used the provided numbers at the regionals and Championship and they worked perfectly. I remember hearing after Week 1 regionals that some teams had trouble with the numbers, but I haven't really heard anything like that since. Did other teams have trouble with the numbers in Atlanta?
Are you suggesting that the announcer was deliberately trying to confuse the camera with his clothing? I'm sure you're not, but FIRST made it clear that they would not go so far as to restrict people from wearing green or anything like that.
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Dave, you hit he nail on the head with your description of how to use the vision system to get reliable results. By limiting where you are looking first and then tracking to a color in only those locations, it makes sense to me why the calibration numbers worked for your system. If your team would be gracious enough to share the code or a white paper more teams could come to an understanding of how to do it correctly. I was not suggesting the announcer was deliberately trying to cause interference, I was only pointing out that First did provide a rule to discourage intentional vision system confusion. Further reading in this thread indicates 66s' problems would have been solved if they had coded the way that your team did. Thanks for the insight Tom Cooper