[mogunus]

I use an offboard coprocessor for ease of programming and added horsepower. The PIC18 C is really too troublesome to write stereoscopic vision routines in, never mind powerful enough to execute them. For Manchester regional, what I got working was a really simple trig-based binocular vision scheme, a complete and total hack using two cameras, the light, and a gumstix. The reason I could use such a trig-heavy approach was the gumstix, you need lookup tables for that on a PIC, and using the actual functions would really slow you down.

For nationals, I'm working on implementing true binocular vision on the gumstix/cmucam array, along with the "light hack" for easy aiming. I might end up adding a third cmucam, I'm not sure. But this opens up all sorts of fun possibilities... In auto, stereoscopic vision combined with a good positioning system can lock on to, track, and ram an enemy bot. When I'm done and it doesn't look stupid anymore, I'll post the code for that.

(Also, the gumstix runs linux. Linux programming environment = wonderful. You can only program a PIC using clunky wine wrapperthings in linux. This way, there's the one PIC code that works and then you're done messing with that, its just easier to work with two linux systems and two REAL implementations of gcc, not PIC18 special C)