Ultrasonic Sensors

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by mikeqfl

Has anyone tried using the camera for ranging information? Is there a canned routine in Labview to do that? Any feedback on how accurate it is? We are using a camera to track the the opposing trailer and need range feedback to feed to our shooting mechanism. We almost have all of the mechanical stuff worked out, time to program and try to make it all work now. Nothing like saving the best for last.

We have set up a routine for doing this, it works ok, but we need to do some more work on our shooter system to get consistent shooting speeds (speed sensor so we can command a specific shooter RPM for the detected distance, rather than just sending a PWM value to the shooter speed controller).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTCr2nvFn3g

We played with an ultrasonic sensor a bit to see if it would work...didn't really see any advantage to it. Although we did not try aiming it up at the vision target, which might work better. The problem is the beam width requires the shooter to be aimed right at the target before it can get a good range number, whereas the camera routine only needs the target to be in the field of vision, which is much wider.