30fps Vision Tracking on the RoboRIO without Coprocessor

[Greg McKaskle]

If you web-search for Zynq vision systems or Zynq vision processing, you will see that a number of companies and integrators use this for professional systems. Zynq from Xilinx is the processor of the RoboRIO.

So I think my take on this is ...

You likely don't need 640x480. It is almost as if that were taken into account when the vision targets were designed.

You likely don't need 30 fps. Closing the loop with a slow-noisy sensor is far more challenging than a fast and less-noisy one. Some avoid challenges, but others double-down.

The latency of the image capture and processing is important to measure for any form of movement (robot or target). Knowing the latency is often good enough, minimizing this is of course good. If there isn't much movement, it is far less important.

The vision challenge has many solutions. Jaci has shown, and I think the search results also show that many people are successful using Zync for vision. But this does take careful measurements and consideration of image capture and processing details.

By the way, folks typically go for color and color processing. This is easy to understand and teach, but it is worth pointing out that most industrial vision processing is done with monochrome captures.

Greg McKaskle