Vision... what? how?

[matthewdenny]

This will be our teams 3rd year coming up. Our goal is to learn to incorporate new things into our robot each year. Last year we started using Pneumatics and Java. This year I would really like to see us incorporate vision. We know basically NOTHING about how to do this. So I'm going to ask a bunch of questions and if you can answer some of them, that would be great.

1) As I understand it onboard processing is much preferable to trying to use the classmate. Is this right?

2) What kind of equipment do you use to do the onboard processing? I haven't seen anyone with a laptop ziptied to the robot.

3) How would you communicate with this onboard vision computer? Does it hook up to the router via ethernet?

4) How do you get the image to the onboard computer from the camera?

5) Is the stock camera acceptable for this? Do we need separate cameras?

6) How do we program this onboard computer? Do we install labview on it? Java?

7) I've heard of RoboRealm for vision processing. Would this be installed on the classmate? the onboard computer? do people use this? is it good?

8) Assuming the onboard computer is getting the image from the camera, and processes it correctly how do we get information (like width, y coordinate, color, etc) from the onboard computer to the java code?

Thanks for all your help. Hopefully by the time the season starts we can have some idea what were doing.