Quote:
Originally Posted by ldeffenb
Yes, there's no other way to do it that often from that many angles (Palmetto Q29) without the camera. As a matter of fact, we noticed that the rack got seriously twisted by the refs just before our matches. 
When you see the robot waddle (software's term) or swagger (team lead's term), you know it's tracking the light.
If the light was too far to the side, the robot would actually drive away from the light keeping it at the edge of the viewfinder until it came into closer alignment with the spider leg at which point it would turn back to the center to score. (Homework for the reader: what light geometry did we use to determine the fact that we were "on the beam"?)
Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software and Coach |
I'm guessing you used blobsize and your distance from the light. At any given distance to the light, there is a nice relationship between viewing angle and blob size, accurate to perhaps +/- 5 degrees.
That is how we started doing it with the Fighting Pi robot. Later on (after we got all the calibration data) we switched to just going to the light regardless of angle for expediency's sake.
In fact, something else we did was to have the robot get a blob size at one location and a blob size at another. By comparing the two you could get your exact position (within a couple inches) anywhere on the field and score on any spider leg.
In this case we had major portions of it working but the setup and calibration was questionable at the regionals (prior to them finally realizing they had to give us time on the actual playing field) so we scrapped it for a simpler system.
Autonomous is fun