2011 Camera Code on Driver Station

[MagiChau]

I plan on using reflection from infrared if possible, if not LED off of the reflection tape on the scoring peg. The Camera will detect this. I have set the camera to grey-scale since full color is unnecessary and take up more space. Maybe use the reflection detected to also detect a circle with some help from the occlusion feature. This can further be used possibly to calculate distance from that circle or help align the robot to the column.

[drakesword]

Originally Posted by ZonChau

I plan on using reflection from infrared if possible, if not LED off of the reflection tape on the scoring peg. The Camera will detect this. I have set the camera to grey-scale since full color is unnecessary and take up more space. Maybe use the reflection detected to also detect a circle with some help from the occlusion feature. This can further be used possibly to calculate distance from that circle or help align the robot to the column.

This software runs on the driver station with the camera plugged into the netgear router. The program does all of the calculations to determine where the reflective tape is and then subtracts the background (the green and red area) then the frame is run through openCV to detect the blobs and do those calculations. Finally the blobs are compared to each other to determine which ones are in a column. Other calculations coming would be angle and distance to targets.

The software then returns the target information (not the image) to the cRio where you would then do your own processing.

[Greg McKaskle]

The latest LabVIEW update also contains an example under the vision category that shows how to statistically locate the columns. It runs on the development computer and uses a folder of images as inputs, so even if you are going to code in Java or C++, you can use it to tune colors, adjust lighting, etc.

Post any questions you have about how it operates.

Greg McKaskle

[drakesword]

I will be releasing the alpha before mid-day tomorrow. Keep your eyes pealed.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by ZonChau

I plan on using reflection from infrared if possible, if not LED off of the reflection tape on the scoring peg. The Camera will detect this. I have set the camera to grey-scale since full color is unnecessary and take up more space. Maybe use the reflection detected to also detect a circle with some help from the occlusion feature. This can further be used possibly to calculate distance from that circle or help align the robot to the column.

also note that the tape on the circle peg is not actually circular,
on the kickoff field it was square. So personally I would not plan on using the circle in your processing, because it very well may not be a circle at competition

[divixsoft]

Could you make the output the pole positions? Also, I admire your effort, the camera code is incredibly complex and hard. When and where will you post this code?

[drakesword]

Originally Posted by divixsoft

Could you make the output the pole positions? Also, I admire your effort, the camera code is incredibly complex and hard. When and where will you post this code?

I will consider that for the next release. At the moment it reports each point in each pole (x, y, size) the poles are divided by 2 bytes with a value of 255

[divixsoft]

Where is the source code?

[drakesword]

Originally Posted by divixsoft

Where is the source code?

Good observation. It will be available in the same place after I clean it up a bit ^_^

[EDIT]

Its up

[divixsoft]

what do you guys think of this code? and how do you transfer the processing from the crio to the classmate using the classes from frc?

[drakesword]

Originally Posted by divixsoft

what do you guys think of this code? and how do you transfer the processing from the crio to the classmate using the classes from frc?

You avoid the cRio handling the camera completely.

The new "robot radio" has multiple ports so you can plug the cRio in one port and the camera in another.

The cRio then doesn't assign an ip to the camera the router does which then you can use to pull images to the classmate.

The program then retrieves the images, processes it, then spits data back to the robot via UDP

[divixsoft]

How is UDP used, and what is UDP?

[Alan Anderson]

UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. It doesn't need any channel setup handhaking before being used, it has a lot less overhead than TCP, and it's used where guaranteed delivery of network packets is less important than the ability to communicate quickly.

See Wikipedia for a bit more detail. See RFC 768 for a lot more detail.

[drakesword]

Found several bugs.

First java on the cRIO does not support UDP. Changed to TCP.
Second the protocol was sending a bunch of empty data (roughly 800 bytes) changed to be dynamicly sized. I am still fixing the samples for release. Expect a java alpha on monday

[drakesword]

Sorry guys I was sick yesterday and the ftp has been down on my server.


{EDIT}

Actually the entire server is down -_-