2009 Control System Feature Wishlist

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

If the goal of multiple cameras is to have a view in multiple directions, a single camera can do this with a mirror and some math. Point the camera straight up. Mount a curved mirror -- a hyperbolic is best, but simple mirrored Christmas balls can work. The image from the camera contains information from all around the camera, but it is distorted due to the shape of the ball. A math transform lets you put the pixels onto a cylinder, letting a single camera see everything around it.

Not the same as stereo-optic vision, but much simpler, and perhaps useful on a crowded field of robots.

Greg McKaskle

My reasoning for asking this is that i believe that FIRST will 'up the ante' when it comes to game complexity because of the advanced features available in the cRIO.

Up until now the vision system used in FIRST has only had to track a single, non-moving, known sized (usually illuminated) target. Thus, it's my belief that FIRST will challange the teams with either (or a combination of) multiple targets, moving targets or targets where their form, color or shape may change.

With 2 cameras and a known distance between them I can calculate distance to a target ... and with 2 frames from each I can calculate the vector (curve with 3 frames, if needed) in 3D and thus estimate a target location at a future time.

Your suggestion of a parabolic mirror (sounds like a fish-eye lens effect) looks like it could answer the multiple targets possibilities but may make image recognition a bit difficult (depending on mirror quality, orientation of the target, distance, etc).

From the answers above, it sounds like the cRIO is quite capable of reading from multiple cameras, but that the processing power may limit the framerate. This leads me to another question. Will the LabView program supplied to FIRST teams be able to compile to processors other that the cRIO PowerPC (Like an ARM processor running linux in a Gumstix)?

P.S. In case it sounds like I'm whining for more ... I want you all to know I love the cRIO. It's a wonderful system, and I can't wait to get my software teams hands on it.