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  #16   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 29-01-2012, 11:25
Greg McKaskle Greg McKaskle is offline
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

The FIRST field is indeed shiny. It has aluminum diamond plate all along the wall, and lexan up above. Lexan is both transparent and reflective. All polished surfaces, like glass, lexan, aluminum, and painted surfaces will reflect to some degree, and that means that overhead lights, and lights from the robots will show up where a reflection point (where the camera and light reflect about the surface normal). Furthermore, the lexan doesn't prevent lights from shining through the back surface, so lights in the stands, windows and other light sources can shine into the camera through the driver wall of lexan. And there are also the t-shirts, hats, and other gear worn by the drivers that are showing through the lexan. It all leads to an image that is quite difficult for simple processing to deal with.

This is why I wouldn't recommend looking just for color. If you combine color and shape info you will be far more robust. This will almost always reject glare, even from the diamond plate. If the shape info is robust enough, you don't even need to use color, just brightness.

The camera will most definitely pick up the hoop, net, and supports. Camera placement is indeed important in part due to the hoop and net blocking the reflective tape. As shown on the targets in the paper, the lower edge will be the first to be impacted.

As for blinding drivers, I don't think the LEDs need to be very bright. Certainly they aren't as bright as the BFL.

Greg McKaskle
  #17   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 29-01-2012, 16:46
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

Quote:
Originally Posted by robokiller View Post
For starters no one can deny the great capabilities that the kinect has and most programmers would love to put this on their robot.

a few problems
1. bad connection between crio and kinect
2. the kinect cant use the ir depth sensor to find retro reflective tape
3. programming in java, c++, or lab view would be kind of reinventing the wheel with C# implementation of the kinect

for the teams that want to use the kinect i have a solution that might be a little hefty for some teams

just a few items to pick up
atx motheroard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138293
cpu 2.6 Ghz http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103944
a stick or 2 of ram
and finally a DC - DC power supply http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/it.A/id.417/.f

What a computer on the robot why???

usb connections and Ethernet connections
usb -> kinect
Ethernet -> crio sending basic commands like aim left or right

what operating system you might ask

puppy linux or tiny core for their capability of loading all data from a flashdrive to ram so if a cold shutdown occurs it doesnt mess up your harddisk

with mono in your linux machine you can start up an exe file developed in C# on your programming computer and transfer it from the bin file

have the exe file start up when your linux box starts send commands over Ethernet saying aim left aim right

complexity 8/10
benefits over regular camera 2/10
bragging rights 10/10

the reason i posted this online is because i want it to be done but it appears our team has decided not to do it.

Does this sound like a good method and what do you guys think
Microsoft has rules prohibiting using the kinect on non Win7 devices, our team is using a PICO-ITX setup for our image processing but we are not planning on using the kinect because of microsofts rules about usage of the kinect...here is a link to the onboard computer we are using wich is much smalle than the ones mentioned http://www.viaembedded.com/en/produc...id=1310&tabs=1
  #18   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 29-01-2012, 17:37
robokiller robokiller is offline
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

Has anyone tried having 2 kinects side by side

if the kinect uses a density of how many dots per square inches having 2 kinects would double the amount of dots and effectively making the kinect think the distance is shorter than what it really is
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Unread 29-01-2012, 18:37
sjspry sjspry is offline
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

There's been about three or four threads about this before this one. The consensus is that it is generally a bad idea. In fact, the shoehorning of the Kinect into this year's competition was less than tactful, and as far as I can tell has only succeeded in upsetting people due to its uselessness.

Do you really want to stick it on the robot? Well... Fine, but you probably won't get much more data from it than you would by just using a camera. You already have distance, based on the starting position. Alignment you would get from the normal camera.

You'll need to spend money to do this. In one of the other threads, someone mentioned a USB-ethernet converter/interface. That would probably be the best option, but it was about $125 or so. Another would be the Panda Board, at closer to $200, but you would need to program it, it is an embedded computer.

Teams should stop getting hung up on the idea of using the Kinect as some kind of uber-sensor. The data will simply not help that much. I would keep it for another time and use it in an off-season project.
  #20   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 29-01-2012, 23:47
robokiller robokiller is offline
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

Quote:
Originally Posted by tickspe15 View Post
Microsoft has rules prohibiting using the kinect on non Win7 devices
microsoft may not make the kinect easy for other operating systems to use but other people have.

http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

and i have successfully used a C# program to control the kinect in ubuntu
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