Poll: Would you be interested in an inexpensive Wide-Angle lens for the Axis Webcam?

[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

Anyway, note that the wider the viewing angle the higher the Distortion.

Greg McKaskle

I wonder if anyone has considered making a spherical imaging sensor.....

Hmmmm. Off to patent search.

Phil.

[Greg McKaskle]

Funny you mention that. I think most RoboCup teams that are allowed use the camera pointed up towards a mirrored surface, hyperbolic is really common I think, so as to have coverage of the entire field. I spoke with a professor who built a cheapy version using a mirrored light bulb and a different transform, and they were able to use robot motion as a stereo-optical substitute with pretty good results.

RoboCup has very standard lines on the field and markings on the robots to make it a bit easier for vision, but it would be a cool system even if you only had a few items to reference for orientation.

Greg McKaskle

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

I wonder if anyone has considered making a spherical imaging sensor.....

Hmmmm. Off to patent search.

Spherical reflective camera systems (both monocular and stereo) are fairly common. Several groups (including NASA, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and MIT) did a lot of early development of the technology more than 15 years ago. Here is one example of a commercialized system from back in 1997.

-dave



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