Vision: what's state of the art in FRC?

[Greg McKaskle]

A few clarifications and a few of my own answers.

NI Vision isn't the same as openni.

The OS on the roboRIO is described in quite a bit of detail here http://www.ni.com/white-paper/14627/en/

The code is on github.

1. There are tradeoffs here that depend on the robot, the strategy, and the team's resources. All have been made to work. The roboRIO is somewhere between 4x and 10x faster. It has two cores and includes NEON instructions for vector processing.

But vision is a hungry beast and will bring any computer to its knees if you just brute force it. The "right" solution depends on where the camera is mounted, where it is pointed, lighting, lenses, and of course processing. Makes it challenging, huh.

2. All of them are capable of solving the FRC imagining problems quite well, IMO.

3. I've seen plenty who make it work.

4. The WPI libraries will continue to support Axis and will support many UVC cameras via NI-IMAQdx drivers. This means that many USB webcams will work. Additionally, we have also tested the Basler USB3 industrial cameras. I have not tested Kinect directly on the roboRIO, though if you google myRIO and Kinect you will see others who have.

Greg McKaskle