How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?

[Greg McKaskle]

I'm not thrilled with the program's ability to track the colors, particularly the green color, but ...

First off, great job getting it integrated. It looks awesome. You probably know this already, but if you disconnect or make the update of the image display optional, your code and camera will run quite a bit faster. That was what the example was doing.

The green color of that fabric is indeed less predictable than the pink, which is why the pink is the primary color by default. For debugging, you may find it useful to switch the first color to green to see the entire green mask. Then tilt the target towards and away of the camera to see if the issue is with the green getting to bright, too dark, or something else. Usually it is either a bright streak or a dark streak.

Once you know how to make it fail, and while it is still running, open up the Find VI, click on the HSL debug switch, and now you can hover the mouse over the green portion of the image to see what the pixel values are in HSL. This will give you an idea of how the different orientations differ, and how much you'll need to lower the saturation or brightness on green to get it covered. You may also decide that you don't want to change it if it is due to tilt which you don't expect in a game.

The debug HSL button is not something I'd leave on for real usage, by the way. It works identically, but slower because of the display, and because of the explicit HSL conversion of every pixel. For normal operation turn the switch off, the threshold will still be done in HSL, but only enough math to perform the threshold.

Greg McKaskle

[paulcd2000]

We've gotten the Camera tracking a pink and green target, identifying which team it is, where it is and how far away it is, and it's all in a modular code block. We modified the Single Color Tracking Example and then added servos and position data.

[Comatose]

What does HSL stand for?

[Sentient]

Hue/Saturation/Luminosity. It is just another way to represent colors than RGB.

[Dr. Manhattan]

I, as the most active of one of three programmers on my team, have made no progress at all. Especially since this is my first time ever using labview, so I'm entirely self taught.

Any help would be greatly, hugely appreciated.

[s0crates]

Originally Posted by Dr. Manhattan

I, as the most active of one of three programmers on my team, have made no progress at all. Especially since this is my first time ever using labview, so I'm entirely self taught.

No progress into making the robot follow a target, or matching the target?
If you're having trouble making it track with the standard gimbal and two color tracking demo, try finding somewhere there is more light - opening the windows where we are made a huge difference. It also took a lot of tweaking of hsl values.


btw see you at the regional

-jonathan

[TheOtherGuy]

We're still having fun trying to get the response time to be faster, but I believe we've reached the highest efficiency we can get before ship. I tracks like no tomorrow, but when the target is moving we're having trouble leading it... We messed around adding in a PID lead/lag loop, but we're only having moderate to no success with that. Has anyone else gotten it to successfully lead a moving target? Any thoughts on that?

By the way, I'm very impressed with the support the community has on the camera this year! Here's a shout out to all the incredibly helpful NI folks that have provided time and resources to ensuring this season's success with the new system!

[Dr. Manhattan]

Originally Posted by s0crates

No progress into making the robot follow a target, or matching the target?
If you're having trouble making it track with the standard gimbal and two color tracking demo, try finding somewhere there is more light - opening the windows where we are made a huge difference. It also took a lot of tweaking of hsl values.


btw see you at the regional

-jonathan

We tried testing it with the full range of color available, yet for some reason the green doesn't show up at all. So far I have no clue why. And for some reason the servo's aren't moving while on gimble tracking mode, I assume they're supposed to and have no clue why.

And yes, see you there.

[s0crates]

Originally Posted by Dr. Manhattan

We tried testing it with the full range of color available, yet for some reason the green doesn't show up at all. So far I have no clue why. And for some reason the servo's aren't moving while on gimble tracking mode, I assume they're supposed to and have no clue why.

And yes, see you there.

The way I did it when it absolutely failed to pick anything up was to start with the range 0-255 for all 3 (hue, saturation, and luminance) and narrow it down from there. Slow, but it works.

Did you put the jumpers next to the servo pwms? Are the pwms in the program the correct ones/where the servos are plugged in?

-jonathan

[Greg McKaskle]

If you aren't having any luck with the colors, you might try the NI Vision assistant. It is an easy way to bring in an image and check out the pixels in HSL. Ideally, you get in the habit of grabbing a couple photos in different orientations, different amounts of light, etc. Then you get a better feel for the range of HSL values needed to cover the different lighting.

Greg McKaskle

[Dr. Manhattan]

Originally Posted by s0crates

Did you put the jumpers next to the servo pwms? Are the pwms in the program the correct ones/where the servos are plugged in?

-jonathan

Yes, I know that the pwm's are correct because we have code to be able to control them with a joystick on the same pwm channels. I'm checking it out now and seeing if we can get it to work, but a lot of our focus is on the encoders at this point in time.

[mikeqfl]

We have our camera tracking ok. It commands a motor to turn a turret to keep the image in the center of its field of view. The problem we are having is the camera/turret is constantly oscillating back and forth trying to find the center. Any ideas of how to put in a PID loop into Labveiw? I am not up on the programming, just trying to help our programmer out.

[s0crates]

Originally Posted by mikeqfl

We have our camera tracking ok. It commands a motor to turn a turret to keep the image in the center of its field of view. The problem we are having is the camera/turret is constantly oscillating back and forth trying to find the center. Any ideas of how to put in a PID loop into Labveiw? I am not up on the programming, just trying to help our programmer out.

It sounds like it would be easiest for you to just have a dead zone in the center of the image - if the target is within a certain bounding box in the center of the image don't try to adjust it any further. Rather than try to center it at the center pixel, aim for a box around the center. It oscillates because the image changes slightly frame-to-frame.

[Lord_Jeremy]

We ran into some pretty massive problems. No matter what we seemed to do, the camera would intermittently find a color (or two) for a few seconds, then x and y would immediately go to maximum. We assumed it was centering on the fluorescent lights in the room, but we're not entirely sure. And it was doing this both with our code and the TwoColorTrackingDemo code. I don't think the camera was at fault, as images grabbed from it looked just fine. We tried manually defining the color fields a couple times but that didn't help. Mind you we're using C/Windriver.

[jacobhurwitz]

We've spent a long time on our camera tracking code, and it finally works very well! (The night before our regional, too. Phew!) Our robot has a shooter, and we're using the camera to aim it at targets and then calculate how far it should fire. I'm pretty sure we'll post all our code on CD at the end of competition season, in case anybody's interested. We also have a pretty cool dashboard