360 degree cameras

[NathanStro]

Somewhere in the rulebook it had a rule about multi-directional camera that was confusing me. Would there be a ban on using a 360 camera to reduce the amount of cameras needed?

[The Doctor]

If it were legal, getting one with high enough resolution to do vision tracking might be difficult.

Because of the retroreflectivity of the targets, you essentially need to point a light source at the targets to get them to light up. With a wide-angle lens, it would be hard to get the lighting facing in the right direction for every possible location of a target.

Also, 360 degree video needs to be remapped onto a flat surface if you want to send it to a vision processing program. This would further warp the video and mess with the resolution.

I'd say just get another camera. We already have plans to use 3-4 cameras on our bot this year.

[NathanStro]

We wouldn't be using it for the vision system. I'm talking about the driver using it for a better field of view.

[engunneer]

Originally Posted by NathanStro

Somewhere in the rulebook it had a rule about multi-directional camera that was confusing me. Would there be a ban on using a 360 camera to reduce the amount of cameras needed?

i don't see any such rule. which one is confusing?

[NathanStro]

R65 A.
pg. 88

[JR0405]

This rule doesn't prohibit a multidirectional camera but instead a multidirectional communication