Camera Lag

[TenaciousDrones]

Is there anyway to increase the feedback rate on the axis cameras. My team ended up not really using our camera last year because there was such a lag that in order to do anything we would have to move then wait for the camera to catch up.

[Racer26]

Turn down its quality settings.

[adciv]

If you're seeing that much lag, you're using too much bandwidth and the FMS QOS is throttling you. I reccomend reducing frame size, reduce frame rate, or reduce quality. If your quality/compression is set below 30, it's set too low.

Can you post what settings you were using so we have a baseline comparison? Also, one thing which would be useful is if you posted how much bandwidth you see at the drivers station when it is tethered directly to the robot.

[Greg McKaskle]

The first thing I'd do is to set it back up and try to reproduce it. Then, if you are using the LV based dashboard, look at the LED and numbers near the video settings to see how much bandwidth you are using and what the settings are. It is also possible to use the Windows task manager to see the usage.

The LED will be green if the video bandwidth is low enough, and there is a yellow and a red. The ring selector lets you change framerate, size, and compression. Think about it and modify the settings to get the network usage down and get the LED to be green.

The actual cause of the lag is that somewhere between the camera and the laptop display, the images are sitting in a buffer waiting for the previous one(s) to get out of the way. In case it isn't simply a network bandwidth issue, you will want to identify whether you think each link between the camera and display are overloaded and causing buffering. For example, you may want to start with the DS laptop itself. View the CPU usage and see if the laptop is not able to keep up. If the CPU usage is 100%, or very high, you may want to experiment to see if the lag goes down when the usage goes down. If the CPU usage is fine, you can then look upstream to the router, then to the camera itself, and there could be other devices in between in some cases.

Greg McKaskle