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Unread 05-04-2006, 20:10
eugenebrooks eugenebrooks is offline
Team Role: Engineer
AKA: Dr. Brooks
no team (WRRF)
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: Livermore, CA
Posts: 601
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Re: Camera did not work for well at the regionals, but worked great at home.

The lighting in the arena could confuse the camera, this becomes very clear when you see the camera lock on to one of the lights. We saw problems in our shop environment with fluorescent lights where the aim of the camera would be off and the confidence value would fluctuate. When we turned the lights off the problem would go away, so we knew it was the lights.

We addressed this issue as follows:

1) Track the confidence value in your code. If bad confidence comes up use the most recent data report from the camera with a good confidence. Our cutoff in this regard was a confidence of 100, bad values were perhaps 30 or less, and typical good values were 160 or greater. When the camera was being confused by the lights, this confusion would fluctuate frame to frame and the ones that were good were marked by good confidence.

2) Don't use automatic search. Use operator control of the turrent to get it pointed in the right direction and have the operator flip a switch to release control to the computer when the green light is seen with a confidence above the cutoff, 100. Your turrent looks a lot smarter to the judges this way. All you need do is indicate good confidence on the OI with an LED.

3) In spite of this, we still had problems at the San Jose regional. This problem was solved by putting a blinder on the camera that kept the arena lighting out of it.

Our shooter did not tilt and the camera was hard mounted to it. The fact that the camera did not tilt probably made it easier for us to construct a blinder that worked. It was cut from cardboard right at the regional and stuck on with velcro, after blackening it with a sharpie pen. It worked really well.

Eugene

Last edited by eugenebrooks : 05-04-2006 at 20:12.