How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?

[weinbergmath]

Hi everyone,

I'm posting two videos of an older robot with the new control system tracking the vision target.

Video 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l64T6wc1Lg

Video 2 - Labview Screen View - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdyzfuzJs-w


We used the Two Color servo tracking vi from NI, and dropped it into the Robot Main vi to control the drive motors of the robot. Please contact me if you have questions on the implementation. The program is set to steer towards the target and maintain a certain distance, which will be adjusted to be at the correct distance to allow our manipulator to drop the moon rocks into the trailer.

I'm not thrilled with the program's ability to track the colors, particularly the green color, but we will continue to test and adjust as time goes on. You can see the intermittent tracking of green in the second video. We will be transplanting the control board to the new robot to tweak it for the new wheels very soon. I expect to be able to take the outputs of this current program and feed them into a traction control algorithm.

On another note, I want to say how enjoyable it has been teaching my students to program the robot using Labview. Most of the programming team has almost no programming experience, but something about Labview has made it less intimidating. The students really seem to enjoy looking through the various functions to find what they want to use, while finding other ones along the way that might be useful later on. Even more interesting, this year's programming team is almost exclusively female! If Labview was the missing factor in getting more girls interested in programming, I will gladly add it to the list of reasons I'm glad we made the decision to use it this year.

One more comment - has anyone found that the camera resets itself when the motors change rapidly? The only cause that makes sense is some sort of noise getting into the system. We changed our tracking to include the PID.vi from the control toolbox, and the system was resetting any time there was integral gain. The camera would reset, and the cRIO would keep doing whatever it was doing just before the camera went out....disabling and re-enabling at the driver station would stop it from moving completely. Please let me know if you have had similar experiences.

Evan