Best board for vision processing (beagle/panda/beaglebone/etc?)

[computerish]

Our team is looking at doing some off-cRIO vision processing next year since the FIRST-provided vision API is so limited. We're looking at purchasing one of the ARM-based boards to do vision processing with OpenCV and send whatever data we need over to the cRIO.

I know at least a few teams have done this last year. What have you used or seen others using as far as hardware? Beagle boards? Pandaboards? Something else?

Thanks!

[Gigakaiser]

987 used a Pandaboard. (documentation here) You may want to look at the Raspberry Pi - it was recently released and only costs $25.

The Pandaboard definitely has more documentation and a larger user base, so it may be easier to get started with it.

[~Cory~]

I just received my $35 model B Raspberry Pi and am doing some initial testing with it. Off-season robots could use the 3x more powerful gooseberry pi (only wifi is supported so competition is out of the question). I've been contemplating creating a simple board with a single Ethernet port and a dspic33, pic32 or DaVinci processor...

In the performance category, a beefy driver station laptop is going to be very difficult to beat.

[EHaskins]

I've used the BeagleBoard-xM for vision processing on non-FRC robots. We were doing optical flow tracking and multiple shape detection at 10-20fps depending on other workloads.

My configuration was C# logic running on Mono using OpenCV through the EmguCV wrapper for .net.

[jlmcmchl]

Originally Posted by Gigakaiser

You may want to look at the Raspberry Pi - it was recently released and only costs $25.

I would also have suggested the Raspberry Pi, the big issue is the time between ordering and receiving the board. I ordered one at the very end of June, and it's not coming in until October. Those things are seriously popular somewhere.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by jlmcmchl

I would also have suggested the Raspberry Pi, the big issue is the time between ordering and receiving the board. I ordered one at the very end of June, and it's not coming in until October. Those things are seriously popular somewhere.

I have had one on order exactly as long as you have. They only produce them in large quantity so that they drive down the costs with quantity.

People see the low costs and think it's fantastic because of the performance for that cost. Well, the trade off is that it's very...very...difficult to get them and usually you can get them one at a time.

[protoserge]

From my limited discussion with some fellow mentors, The RoboBees (FRC 836) are experimenting with a PandaBoard for stereo vision.

FWIW, I think they are $169, which is still cheap.

I don't know much more than that since I'm just a mechanical mentor

[mdrouillard]

We have a beagleboard XM rev C, with Ubuntu running on it. However we are having a real tough time getting OpenCV compiled and built for it. Currently stuck in the steps regarding ffmpeg as this portion refuses to compile. Does anyone have experience in getting this working that could assist me?

I have googled to the end (it seems) of the interwebs. I am currently following 2 recipes from http://www.ozbotz.org/opencv-installation/ and http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/Ubuntu_Packages with limited success.

The ./configure line I used before the make is...

ubuntu@omap:~/OPCVtry2/ffmpeg-0.11.1$ ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-version3 --enable-x11grab --enable-pthreads --enable-pic

which gets me to
ffmpeg-0.11.1/libavcodec/libx264.c:478: undefined reference to `x264_encoder_open_124'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [ffmpeg_g] Error 1

Any ideas folks?

Many thanks.

[Foster]

Recent production increase of the Raspberry PI and a memory increase to 512 makes this a better choice as a co-processor. Delivery times are now ~14 days, so ordering now is a must.

Still love the Beagle Bone for the IO farm it has, but for a small vision processor the PI has moved to the front.

I still think that computer vision isn't possible this year. Too much color differences between shops (crappy incandescent), practice field (florescent) and game fields (mercury and sodium). St Louis has the new SuperLux lamps to make color and brightness on TV work well. But I think the improvements in processors will let the vision sent back to the player station be a huge bonus.

[billbo911]

Foster, I have to agree with you on one point here, and respectfully disagree on another.

Originally Posted by Foster

Recent production increase of the Raspberry PI and a memory increase to 512 makes this a better choice as a co-processor. Delivery times are now ~14 days, so ordering now is a must.

Still love the Beagle Bone for the IO farm it has, but for a small vision processor the PI has moved to the front.

I think the PI has good potential to be an outboard video processor and am hoping to give it a try.

Originally Posted by Foster

I still think that computer vision isn't possible this year. Too much color differences between shops (crappy incandescent), practice field (florescent) and game fields (mercury and sodium). St Louis has the new SuperLux lamps to make color and brightness on TV work well. But I think the improvements in processors will let the vision sent back to the player station be a huge bonus.

Lighting variations between your shop and the playing field should have little or no affect on your performance.
If careful White Balance and Brightness calibrations are performed in your shop, and then again on the competition field, you should have very similar, if not identical outcomes.
By no means should you allow either of these values to run in Auto mode, especially the White Balance.

We have successfully used cRio vision processing for the last few years with solid results because we made sure we performed these calibrations in both locations.

[roystur44]

2012 we used a FitPC2 coupled to a custom circuit board( gyro, power regulator, multiple high speed encoder inputs)

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/

[Tom Bottiglieri]

I'd recommend doing some benchmarks on these platforms before making a recommendation. The Pi, while a cool board for the price, is pretty underpowered for this kind of task. I was only able to pull about 10 FPS off a Logitech webcam using the Pi using OpenCV without doing any image analysis. I was using the Python bindings so there is probably some performance to be claimed by nixing the interpreter and compiling some C, but I don't think it will be much.

[daniel_dsouza]

What would you think of this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=50002136%2040000003& IsNodeId=1&name=Barebone%20Systems

they seem to be good for the price...The only problem is a power supply. But if you were robot mounting a kinect, you would probably have enough experience to power this as well...

[mdrouillard]

Hello all, some more information from my earlier post.

I was running Ubuntu 11.04 on the beagleboard which ofcourse is an ARM processor. As it turns out, ubuntu removed support in the kernel for some of the features that I was trying to link against, and there really is no way of gettng this package to compile under 11.04 on arm. So, I did discover that OpenCV can be built into the kernel under Angstrom using the narcissus image building tool so that is what I am off to attempt now.

As a positive side effect of this, the beagle board now is clocking at 1Ghtz, rather than the 650 that ubuntu was running at, since the angstrom image is better optimized for this hardware.

[brian.axelrod]

Originally Posted by daniel_dsouza

What would you think of this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=50002136%2040000003& IsNodeId=1&name=Barebone%20Systems

they seem to be good for the price...The only problem is a power supply. But if you were robot mounting a kinect, you would probably have enough experience to power this as well...

Team 846 ran with http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856119069 this offseason (replacing a beagleboard which we used during the season). It turned out to be a very convenient solution, small, light, inexpensive and powerful. We are booting ubuntu server off an SD card formatted to have both a windows readable FAT32 partition, and a linux partition. We are powering it with http://www.amazon.com/3-5-30V-4-0-30.../ref=pd_ybh_15, which worked. The peak power draw (only during the boot) is roughly 20 watts. Its easy to work being x86 , and we don't have to worry too much about performance. We're running two vision programs all the time (one for aligning the robot shooting yaw and distance, and one for tracking and picking up balls autonomously faster than a driver can ), and we just leave both running at the same time. We don't even max out the CPU freerunning at over 30 FPS for both programs (admittedly with the same code that was originally optimized for the beagleboard).

In short, why we chose (and love) a solution like this:

• Ease of use (x86)
• Performance
• Ease of powering
• Low cost
• Lots of IO (The beagleboard only has a single USB port whose bandwidth is shared with the usb to ethernet chip and the usb hub)
• Ease of fetching video and logs from the computer using the flash card
• Modularity, its a lot easier for someone to work on the vision code at home, making it easier to involve more programmers.