Vision Tracking With Color

[DavidGitz]

We purchased the Ring Light from AndyMark as part of our FIRST Choice order. When we got it we epoxied it to the Axis camera with the lens in the center and hooked up the Ring Light to a 12V connection on the PD Board. We took a bunch of pictures at 320x240 resolution with the camera/LED with our Target and even in fairly bright ambient lighting the reflective tape is very bright. We started experimenting with the Vision Assistant using the method described here (Thanks Greg!) and after some tuning of the color parameters we found very good results with tracking the center of the Target with an execution time of approximately 12 mS. True, this was measured on the Laptop we were using and we have no testing yet on the cRIO itself but I am very impressed so far.

I am now a firm believer in the method described in Greg's paper rather than performing shape recognition. Earlier testing with the picture from the FRC manual (shrunk down to 320x240) required almost a full second per image to process, using the Performance Meter in Vision Assistant.