How far have you gotten on coding the camera tracking?

[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