Automatic catcher?

[Pault]

Originally Posted by faust1706

Tracking a ball is a feat on its own than not many teams get around to doing, yet alone calculating its trajectory and autonomously moving to where it is going to land. It involves some serious geometry if your camera is not perpendicular to the ground. You also have to account for the delay. Can you write an efficient enough program that will give an accurate solution in time? It is a very complex problem, but a lot of fun to solve.

I would simply go off driver reflex, and I'm the vision programmer on the team.

It's probably still a waste of time, but I can think of an easier way to do this. It requires a omnidirectional drivetrain. Basically you use PID. For left to right, it is simply using PID to try and center the ball on your camera's x-axis. Forwards and backwards is a bit more difficult. I would probably use some sort of function which combines the current size and height of the ball, and feed that into PID. It seems like with some tuning you could get it to work.