Vision tracking: Did they get it right?

[rjbarra]

I think the camera will be worth using for aiming the kicker

[basicxman]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The reason auton scoring is beneficial, in my opinion, is that the goals will be completely undefended. You might not even need to camera track to score in them.

I'm going to be devil's advocate and say the goals will not be defended for all 15 seconds in autonomous.

Vision tracking is definitely beneficial in any game, especially with this new control system allowing you to feed it straight to the classmate.

The window of use in autonomous is generally smaller this year because unless you have a strong kicker there's not a lot of opportunity. (Well, I can think of more for defensive bots but I'll keep them to myself )

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by rjbarra

It uses RobertDrive class which does not support crab drive

I assume you're referring to the "RobotDrive" class.

It would be easy enough to create your own CrabDrive class which extends the RobotDrive class. This would allow you to pass a CrabDrive to the vision code and have it work properly.

class CrabDrive : RobotDrive {
 //build your class here. 
}

Yay for inheritance and OOP!

[Jon236]

Our drivers were very impressed by a demo of the system. They feel that they can drive and play with the camera alone!

This should be an interesting game!

[flameout]

We just tried it yesterday, and I agree that it works great this year.

Last year, I couldn't get it to work correctly, but this test, I tried the example code with a basic setup, and it worked right out of the box! It's quicker and more accurate than any human driver, unless the driver wants to aim with the camera (waiting for the updates) or is standing right behind the robot.

Hopefully, we'll have a good autonomous program -- if our kicker isn't accurate to score from the far zone (we'll try to be in the far zone on most matches,) then I'll aim towards the center (so I don't kick it out of the arena.)

[FRC4ME]

Team 619 finds that the camera code works great this year! It truly was a turnkey operation. Knowing what a pain the camera has been in previous years, I assigned three programmers the task of making it work. They finished in about two days.

CircleTrackerDemo contains a function called "getHorizontalAngle()". You call it and it gives you the horizontal angle to the target. It's that simple. No lighting constants to tune, color constraints to check...etc.

They even went ahead and showed you how to set up a PID loop and gyro. We don't use those high-level features of WPIlib (that's a little too easy IMO), but one can literally download the sample program to the robot and have a working vision tracking system.