Team 254 Presents: CheesyVision

[Woolly]

Originally Posted by seg9585

Wouldn't it be easier just to hold up a light or large board of a specific color to discern between the two?
Basically we are just concerned about answering a boolean question here. As in: "Is the left goal hot?" If no, don't hold up the board/light and assume the right goal is hot. If yes, hold up your indicator.

Well, the problem right now with the high variance in timing of the hot goals,using that kind of methodology leads to the robot assuming a right hot goal while there is no hot goal.
The way 254 has done it, if both hands are in their respective boxes, the robot knows that neither hot goal has lit up, and therefore won't start it's autonomous routine until it receives data from the laptop saying that there is a hot goal to shoot balls into.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by seg9585

Wouldn't it be easier just to hold up a light or large board of a specific color to discern between the two?
Basically we are just concerned about answering a boolean question here. As in: "Is the left goal hot?" If no, don't hold up the board/light and assume the right goal is hot. If yes, hold up your indicator.

The goal was to have zero external devices that could run out of batteries, get left in the pit/cart/etc, be dropped, or otherwise malfunction at the worst possible moment. Holding your hands in the box on a static background is a pretty darn repeatable action and satisfied that requirement.

[waialua359]

This is easily the simplest most innovative control method this season.
Kudos to whoever came up with the idea and I can see this becoming the standard in subsequent seasons.

[Tottanka]

Team 3211 The Y Team from Israel did the same thing in the Israeli regional, worked 100% of our matches.
We however used facial recognition libraries, so when the camera recognizes a face, it knows there's a hot goal in front of it.
We later tried printing pictures of Dean and Woodie to use, but they turned out not 3-D enough for the face recognition...

We were'nt sure if its 'legal', so we asked the head ref, who approved the use of that. The only relevant Q&A states that a kinect might be used, we didnt know if a webcam is ok too...

Ill talk to our programs and try having the code here later on, we used Labview on the robot and python with openCV for that image recognition.

Also, we were told by the FTA that he noticed us sending a lot of info through the fields bandwitdh, and that it might cause problems.
We decided to have the drivers shut down the image recognition running at the begining of teleop, to avoid any possible problems or delays (which we didnt have, but just to be sure).

Thanks Poofs! Its an honor seeing that our idea is used by you guys too =]

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Tottanka

Also, we were told by the FTA that he noticed us sending a lot of info through the fields bandwitdh, and that it might cause problems.

How/why would this use a lot of bandwidth?

[eddie12390]

This is awesome, we currently have the Kinect set up but this wouldn't require all of the extra equipment.

[Michael Hill]

We actually just put on a banner sensor at the last competition, but made it slightly rotatable so we just moved the sensor. Our drive team was able to consistently find the target in about 10 seconds. Maybe it was your placement/mount of the sensor that made you guys take a while?

[Tottanka]

Originally Posted by dcarr

How/why would this use a lot of bandwidth?

No idea. Im more of a mechanics guy, but the FTA came to us saying that he noticed it, and said that if it disrupts the field somehow he will shut us down. Never happened.

[Billfred]

How many times can the Poofs blow our minds in one season?

Thank you for sharing this with teams--I bet it's going to see a lot of play at Championship. Maybe even district championships too, for teams on the stick.

[Yipyapper]

Originally Posted by Tottanka

No idea. Im more of a mechanics guy, but the FTA came to us saying that he noticed it, and said that if it disrupts the field somehow he will shut us down. Never happened.

The Kinect might use a lot of resources, but if it's on the driver station and connected via USB, there should be no data sent to the robot save a value or two, which is negligible. If it's on the robot and the processing is done via Wi-Fi, then you have a significant problem with bandwidth (most likely).

[Ben Martin]

Big thanks to 254. You've given us Cheesy Drive code (which we're running an implementation of right now) and now this little gem.

Thanks for everything you guys do to build teams up.

[Tottanka]

Originally Posted by Yipyapper

The Kinect might use a lot of resources, but if it's on the driver station and connected via USB, there should be no data sent to the robot save a value or two, which is negligible. If it's on the robot and the processing is done via Wi-Fi, then you have a significant problem with bandwidth (most likely).

We originally planned on Doing Retroflective recognition with Kinect + Resbery Pie, but when we saw all the problems we switched to the Laptop's Webcam and driver interaction.
We even turned the RPI off, so there would be no problems there.
I too, dont see how it should pass that much packages through the field, but do remember the FTA coming to talk to us about it. There were no problems, but i just wanted to give teams a "heads up", that if not implemented correctly this code might be problematic.
That said, it's not that hard to implement.

On another note, maybe the teams who have tried this method can do some kind of an 'help all teams' stand at the championship, where we could set together premade codes for C, Java and Labview, and just come to teams and help them get those 5 more points. Sounds easy enough, nost laptops already have webcams - so why not. It's kinda like waht 254 did to 971 at SVR, isnt it?
Ideas?

[Niezrecki]

Wow! Thank you so much for sharing. This is a wonderful means for hot goal detection that would be absolutely wonderful to use. Impressive as usual Cheesy Poofs!

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by dcarr

How/why would this use a lot of bandwidth?

It uses FAR LESS BW than a camera on the robot sending video TO the DS.
It only sends 1 byte every 25ms. The flow if FROM the DS to the cRio.

If the processing was done on the cRio, then the FTA would have a point, but it is not. All processing is done on the DS and only one byte is sent. How the cRio uses that byte is up to the team.

[nlknauss]

Wow, awesome work here Jared and 254! Thank you for sharing the work and looking to improve the FRC community.