Reflective Tape Purpose

[mikegrundvig]

I'm sorry, this is a REALLY stupid question but I'm going to ask it anyways as I want to understand. What's the purpose of the reflective tape on the backboards. Is the assumption that we can get a camera on the robot to track our distance and orientation to the backboard with the tape? That's my assumption but in practice, that's a very hard problem to solve and my tiny bit of experience with computer vision makes me cringe to try it. The limited processing power available combined with the low resolution of the cameras and "swamping" overhead lights make this seem very nasty.

In theory, you can determine your angle in relation to the backboard as well as your distance by knowing the size of the rectangles in advance and seeing how much they "deform" and shrink. Your distance is determined by how large they are and you angle by how much they have skewed. This seems feasible but my experience with computer vision is with using feducial markers and very short distances. Even a sheet-of-paper-sized marker only works for about 8 feet on my webcam and that's in pretty good lighting.

Is anyone planning on really trying to do computer vision for those targets? Is there some trick to making them show up better? I'd love anyone's thoughts on this. Thanks!

-Mike