Autonomous: CMUCam or dead reckoning?

[miketwalker]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Wow, did you guys really manage to judge distance based on the size of what the camera is seeing? I'm impressed.

We did it by mounting the camera about three feet up and using trig to calculate the distance to the tetra based on the angle of depression to it.

If you think bout it... from any angle the tetra (or goal for that matter) is turned... the width is about the same, not enough off to make any significant difference. Thus, when lookin at it and having the camera straight on at the same angle every time... you can say "once the thing is this wide, stop and lift your arm". Both the trig way and this way work similar from what I can tell, I just figured A) without servos theres one less thing to mechanically go wrong and B) dont need to waste precious variable and programming space on trig functions.