FRC Blogged - The 2015 Control System Request for Proposa

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Hjelstrom

I'm excited to see USB support being considered for the robot controller (lets get kinects on the robots!) and I still think there is value to doing vision on the robot.

Under the COTS rules you can put a laptop with it's own battery on the robot. That laptop could connect to a Kinect right now. You don't even have to run Windows there is work underway for Linux. It really doesn't differ in any way from the way the existing fields connect to the Kinect.

The issue with adding Kinect to just any USB Host, even if it has the hardware, is that you need the software for it. If you have say OpenEmbedded running you can get drivers. However, then you're back to robbing CPU time from the rest of the control system to process video. Also there are usually compromises made to reduce the resources of Linux to make it fit into a smaller package. For example uCLinux which doesn't need a memory controller. You still get something that is basically Linux but what do you compromise on in the process?

I guess it comes down to how bad do you want a PC on your robot before it just makes more sense to put a PC on your robot?