Are vision system worth it

[Jared Russell]

The good news is each year, the vision system released at kickoff is better and easier to use than the year previous.

The bad news is that as of 2013, the vision system is still really complicated and requires dedicated mentors and/or unusually experienced students (and a lot of time) to really be able to use it effectively. Even then, it is not like the vision system is the most important part of most robots.

341's 2012 robot used camera-based targeting to aim every single shot we took during the season. But there were plenty of other teams that (in teleop at least) were just as accurate and quick using manual aiming. Sometimes quicker. We heavily emphasized the vision code since it was a requirement to pull off our ambitious autonomous strategy (which really drove the design of the entire robot, from drive to intake to hopper to shooter). Once we had it working pretty well in autonomous, we didn't have to change anything to use it in teleop as well. But if autonomous hadn't had such a huge impact on scoring that year, we likely would not have worked as hard as we did on the vision code.

I strongly recommend looking at the 341 vision code I released last year (and I promise that some day soon I'll release the 2013 version with "point and click" calibration) and see if you can make sense of what is being done. If you have the time, try it on a prototype or old robot. Feel free to ask questions about it. But I would strongly recommend that unless software is a particular strength of your team, keep it "out of the critical path" and have a fallback plan in case it just isn't ready on time.