Using a coprocessor for vision

[jojoguy10]

Hi there!

Our team has never really had great success with vision. Specifically talking about this last year (Arial Assist), our code would work half of the time to find the "hot" goal.

I've heard that some people use a separate processor (like the NVIDIA TK1 Jetson (I think?)) to program the vision code. How would our team implement this?

We use Labview to program our robot. I'm wondering how we can use a different/better solution to using the cRIO or Drive Station to do the vision processing.

Thanks in advanced!
Joe

[jojoguy10]

*bump*

[Greg McKaskle]

The Jetson board is relatively new, but some teams have incorporated other processors and placed their vision code on it. Searching CD for coprocessor will turn up half dozen different approaches teams have used. It will also bring up some of the issues they have to deal with in order to make their solution effective -- power, communications, and programming among them.

Computer vision is a hard problem, and adding CPU to it doesn't trivialize it. It will open up the door to using higher resolutions, higher framerate, and additional algorithms, but code that doesn't work on the cRIO probably doesn't work on the coprocessor either.

To review the options for vision:
The roboRIO will be about 4x faster than the cRIO.
The dashboard laptop is far faster than either of these, but you must deal with your limited bandwidth and communications delays.
An onboard coprocessor gives you a dedicated piece of HW to integrate with your camera, but there are challenges in getting it to work and keeping it working.

I'm not trying to talk you out of using a coprocessor, but I will also suggest that you look at your previous vision solution and determine why it failed half the time. Getting better at debugging vision problems is key to knowing how to improve it by whatever means.

Greg McKaskle

[billbo911]

Greg has given some excellent advice here. Understanding the problem will help you find a solution.

Search for "DoubleVision" to find a solution we used.

[jojoguy10]

Thanks guys! We will look into playing with our vision code and making it work a bit better this year. I just always wondered why some teams use a coprocessor as opposed to the driverstation or cRIO in te past.

I got my answer.