camera

[GioCharles]

Are there any limits to how many cameras the robot can have??

[Al Skierkiewicz]

It depends on what you are doing with them. It will be very difficult to adjust video from multiple cameras and stay within the bandwidth limits. If you are simply recording they will all need to be weighed on the robot during inspection and pass mechanical inspection as well. All robot rules apply.

[buchanan]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

...stay within the bandwidth limits...

I haven't seen anything explicit about how this is to be enforced. My reading of the FMS WP suggests that it will be by simple bandwidth throttling of low-priority (other than "voice") packets. This would mean the consequences of too-greedy camera settings would be lag and lost frames, but not loss of control packets (and hence robot shutdown) or penalties for rule violation. Does this seem a reasonable reading? Has the subject been directly addressed elsewhere?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I have not heard about enforcement but I do know that the FMS operators will be able to tell bandwidth issues with the tools available to them.

[protoserge]

The FTA will kindly ask you to help everyone out by getting your bandwidth usage down. Ask us how we know

If you have a good router at your test area, see if you can monitor bandwidth usage with everything on its maximum resolution and sampling rate. I think you want to get below 7-8Mbps. With two axis cameras and a fairly high resolution and refresh rate, we were operating around 12-15 Mbps (my memory is muddy). When combined with another team using a lot of bandwidth, we would control brownout the robots on our alliance due to packet loss.

The information from last year's Einstein report also stated they would apply QoS this season if I'm not mistaken.

[Mark McLeod]

For reference, here's the official rule on bandwidth this year:

R59

Communication between the ROBOT and the OPERATOR CONSOLE is restricted as follows:
...
B. Bandwidth: 7 Mbits/second

The default dashboard gives you an easy way to play with video streams to see the effect on bandwidth of resolution/fps/compression.
Using the Dashboard tools, you'll need to get the total video bandwidth down around 5 Mbits/second to allow room for transmission overhead and control data packets.