Autonomous Target Tracking at Regionals

[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by Doug Leppard

We had no problem seeing the camera at Forida regional.
.

What software were you using??? MPLAB or other.

Do you have access to your camera.h file? can you attach it?

[Doug Leppard]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

What software were you using??? MPLAB or other.

Do you have access to your camera.h file? can you attach it?

We used easyc pro. The camera acquired the light all 16 times at the regional and made the ringer 13 times.

Our sister bot at peachtree could not see the light on the playing field and we finally solved the problem by switching cameras.

[Lacey K Mandle]

Team 648 is having a similar problem at the Midwest Regional. Even tho we hang autonomously on the practice field well, we have only scored once during competition - so far! (It is our first year using the camera, so we may have to work some bugs out yet)

At least we are trying - no one else here is trying to score in autonomous mode. Is that true at other regionals?

[Spencer E.]

0705920, would I be able to get my hands on the solution? I would really appreciate it , just send me a PM if you have time.

[Donut]

Our camera was able to lock on at Arizona with the default values; it was having problems initially, but this was because our limits on the maximum tilt and pan angles didn't allow the camera to look up high enough to see the lights. It did it in all our matches Saturday, and one or two on Friday as well.

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Lacey K Mandle

At least we are trying - no one else here is trying to score in autonomous mode.

Autonomous Boycott?

[Lacey K Mandle]

no, two other teams finally tried but they didn't come very close...so right now were still the only ones. we'll have to wait and see what happens in quater finals

[Doug Leppard]

Our sister bot 1369 made two auto modes in finals, both made the diference in winning and loosing.

Again it didn;t work until they switched camers.

[Storcky]

We finally got the auto mode working. we found out that the camera color setting is set by the GUI. The last time that we had used the GUI was to focus the camera, so it was still in the RGB mode. After that, we still had to switch our camera out, but then IT WORKED! Unfortunately, we only had 1 match left yesterday, and then the Quarterfinals.

[PhilBot]

As the starter of this thread, I'm happy to report that I finally managed to get the camera working on Saturday, and managed to score twice in Autonomous mode. Once in the seed matches and once in eliminations.

Both times were 100% camera directed as the bot started out-off target, stopped, turned towards the light, ran forward, overshot by about 4 inches, backed up and dropped the tube. It was a joy to watch.... I need to post video

Unfortunately, I had changed two things prior to the match.... so no definiative answer as to the cause/solution.

1) Yes we did change the camera, because once we got the GUI hooked up, we were unable to re-focus the picture. It was focussed prior to shipping, but i couldn't get it to re-focus, so I don't know if there is any way to permanently miss-align the optics. The poorly focussed camera was able to deal with the light in a benign environment, but not on the high intensity field.

2) The other factor that caused me concern is that the target.cfg file that the labview GUI is using has a bunch more parameters than are being set by the default camera.c/h code. It occured to me that it may be a requirement to FIRST load the target parameters using the Labview GUI, and then the Kevin Watson code jsu loads a subset of the commands required for color tuning. Since the last thing we did with the camera before shipping was focus it, we had would have loaded the default "human viewing" camera configurations. It occured to me that these settings may had left some parameters set badly for tracking....

Anyway, we made both of these changes in a vain hope that one or both would make the difference.....

Clearly, having a well focussed camera is important, but I KNOW that it was focussed in Pittsburg & we still had the problem on the field, so maybe the trick is ALSO loading the 2006target.cfg once, to set the "other" parameters.

Phil.

edit: Ha Ha... I see our programmer also just posted the same informnation... Hi Sarah

[Lacey K Mandle]

well in the semi -finals/finals we scored in autonmous mode three times in a row, it was pretty sweet. I would like to thank our programmers who are students for working very hard to finish after we had shipped the robot. we could score continously on the practice field but on the playing field we had a few problems. We're thinking of putting shields around the camera, so it can focus better.

[Kingofl337]

Team 40 also had an extremely difficult time getting the camera to work using a the 2007 camera. The CCD seems to react to the light differently, a good test
would be to fire up Labview and using the same base board grab a screen shot with the 05/06 lens and the 07 lens using the 06 light settings. Chances are you will see the light with the 05/06 lens and you will see nothing with the 07.

Increasing the brightness and ACG Gain to 20 seems to help the 07 lens but unfortunately the cameras lock will still be intermittent unlike last year where a steady lock was achieved. Team 40 ended up going to an ultrasonic sensor to backup the camera for distance and were able to score 3 times (once without the light) once the switch was made.

[bear24rw]

We were using out values from last year (different from the default ones). These values worked fine for us all of last year, including NJ, Pallmetto, and Atlanta. This year we went to NJ and it worked fine but then when we went to NY out camera never really locked on, we ended up taking the camera really close to the field and taking another picture. We found it really hard to find a set of values that worked. In NY the ceiling was alot lower then at any regional that we have been to before and we found the all of the over head lights look exactly like the green one.

[Teched3]

It seems everyone is having tracking problems. If you have a solution, post it on ChiefDelphi, so we can all be successful. It works great in the pits, on the practice field, but not during the matches. I will forward your reply to our student programmer. All FIRST officials say is everything is working fine. It is obvious that it is not.

By the way, it worked sometimes at the BAE Granite State Regional, and would not lock on at all at the Chesapeake Regiona. Very frustrating.

Thanks, BuzzRobotics, Team 175

[Danny Diaz]

All I know is that last year we had no problem locking onto the green target, but this year we've been unable to see the target at all, even in our shop. Every light looks like the green light, or no light looks like the green light - we can't seem to find a break where the green light stands out. We're going to keep trying once we get to Lone Star, but we don't know if we'll have any success there.

-Danny