Does anyone know the range of the cmu2cam. How far can it see ? any answers would be greatly appricated thanks.
Bumping somebody’s robot, while it might interfere with a robot’s autonomous program, is part of the game. It is possible to anticipate this and if you are really good, work around it using sensors. If you are indeed using guidance, rather than dead reckoning (gee I wonder why they call it that? 
) then a bump will be no more than an inconvienience.
But doing something deliberate to cause another’s robot to see something that isn’t there, is an entirely different matter. The nice term is “spoofing”. It means making a something appear that isn’t really there. The not so nice term is “lying”. When you do this you are deliberately causing the sensor to tell the robot’s RC an untruth. Lying is never GP.
If the rules specifically allowed this sort of thing and we were expected to cope, then that would be a different thing.
ChrisH
Rust-Oleum Fluorescent Green is the color being used on the plywood sides of the green vision tetras. There is a built in function in the camera that automatically attempts to adjust contrast and brightness until it has roughly equalized it (meaning about 50% of the pixels the camera is reading fall on one side of the spectrum, and 50% fall on the other). The good thing about this is that it permits colors to be recognized more accurately and consistently overall but the bad thing is that there aren’t too many shades of brightness and contrast between MOE Green and the Rust-Oleum Fluorescent Green. Fortunately I think the RGB is different enough to maybe differentiate us from it, not that I particularly think the RGB has to be different at all, as I will explain later.
Here is the Rust-Oleum green indicated:
http://www.rustoleum.com/Product.asp?frm_product_id=37&SBL=1
Here is MOE Green: (Just check out the text/pictures)
http://www.moe365.org/
As Dave commented, there are many ways to avoid having your robot track another robot in autonomous. The camera draws the smallest possible square around any patch of the color it’s looking for. It then reports the 4 coordinates to you. If you find the area of the square (not hard) you will be able to tell the relative size of the object you’re looking at. Because it reports the coordinates instead of just the size of the picture it is also possible to tell the height of the object you’re looking at, depending on how you mount your camera. The third way would be to limit the movement of your robot to your half of the field or to the vision tetra positions (harder to implement than to say, but possible). For something else to be the same size, height, color, and in about the same place as the tetra’s panel it pretty much has to be intentional, even for we teams who are natural greens.
In regards to strategically painting your robot green. I do not foresee any physical damage coming to your robot from this because no one will be moving that fast if they’re using the camera alone to guide them. Do not take this to mean that you can go on an intentionally distracting path in autonomous mode and expect to come out fine. I suspect that many people will not be using this camera at all and will, instead, be running their side of the field around at relatively high speeds in autonomous modes. If you got close enough to a side that your robot was relatively the size of a vision Tetra to an opponent looking with the camera then you’d probably be in the path of someone running around. There would be a big boom and you would feel silly because not only your distraction didn’t work, but also your robot got broken before driver mode even started.
So few people are going to end up using the camera, which will required a phenomenal amount of debugging, that building a robot with the intent of distracting the tetra-tracking robots would be an ultimately unsuccessful strategy. If you did not build a robot specifically designed to distract other robots then it would probably be unable to take the abuse of the circuit riders.
Not to mention that intentionally distracting the camera is illegal via R26 and completely against the spirit of gracious professionalism.
PS. All of the information that I posted in this post is included and easily accessible in your Camera manual pdfs. If you want to know more go look it up. They do not list a specific focal length in any of the documentation I’ve read so far, so it will probably be up to testing. The range probably is dependant on the focus of your camera and the resolution of the camera’s image.
I’ll just say that I don’t agree with this interpretation of GP. I’m of the opinion that it is futile and silly to try to apply GP to the entire game. If my plan was lying to a robot, then removing tetras from under a goal is stealing. Pushing another robot is assault. Actually breaking another robot is commiting grievous bodily harm, even if accidental. I could go on, but I think my point is clear. The game is the game, and robots are robots. Anthropomorphizing the robots and their actions is just silly and leads to some very odd conclusions.
I’ve been in the position of having a robot blocked and effectively immobilized so that we could do nothing against our opponent to win the match. I never once thought that they weren’t playing fair or were being unGP by preventing us from doing anything. I was highly frustrated, but accepted the fact that they’d out-thought us and had a better designed robot. Or used their robot more effectively.
Ok no one can possible argue with this:
<R93> Decorations must not affect the outcome of the match, and must be in the spirit of “Gracious
Professionalism.”
Whether or not your distracting the other teams robot is GP doesnt matter, because you “must not affect the outcome of the match”. If you cannot affect the outcome of the match you would be better off just avoiding putting green on your robot, because a) you would be more likely to screw with your own alliances robots than those of the other alliance and b) when you did screw with your alliances robots, and you tried to protest the match on the grounds that your decorations had affected the outcome (by making your team loose), the judges would probly just reply with some equivalent of “that sucks for you”
R93 concerns non-functional decorations that don’t have to meet any electrical/material/cost requirements on the robot. The non-functional decoration rules are intended to prevent teams from using other camera systems to see what the robot sees, etc. I think a green panel on the robot would be legal if you account for the materials and such and your green panel conforms to all other robot rules. If all painting of the robot and decorations had to abide the “can’t affect the outcome of the match”, then arguably you couldn’t customize your paint job to make it easy to see your robot across the field and quickly tell its orientation by what colors you can see on it.
Also, I’m not particularly talking about painting the whole robot green because the definitely would confuse my alliance partners. I was more thinking of just a green panel on the front that only my opponents could see.
I think we need some clarification from FIRST. Removable green panels or no? (Incidentally, one of our team colors is green.)
Kevin,
Your point of view is well outlined here. Please have your team’s main contact post the question to FIRST in the official Q&A if you really feel your strategy would be a legal one. Thanks.
Already done. We asked two days ago and are simply waiting for a reply, I’m just explaining my position here and such. I don’t think my question could be most definitive:
<R26> No devices or decorations are permitted on the robot that are intended to jam or interfere with the operation of the vision system (i.e. changing robot color to confuse opponent’s vision system).
It is becomming very frustrating to watch this thread grow and see the obvious efforts that certain people are taking to find a way to circumvent the rules. Rule <R26> is about as simple as it can be. The intent of this rule is obvious, even to my third-grade daughter. YOU CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO INTENTIONALLY INTERFERE WITH THE VISION SYSTEM OF THE OPPOSING ALLIANCE.
If you intentionally paint your robot a color intended to confuse the opponents vision system, then you are violating the rule.
If you design a removable placard to put on the front of your robot that has the specific purpose of confusing the opponents vision system, then you are violating the rule.
If you are stupid about this and violate the rules, and thereby cause your alliance to lose a match, then your alliance partners will gang up on you and violate your robot.
Can it be any more clear? What is so hard to understand about this?
-dave
Being from New York, we are dressing our team in black since it’s a cool fashion statement.
We’re also painting our robot in dark-gray radar reflective stealth paint such that the robot will be INVISIBLE to the others and we can then freely slip into the enemy camp, knock off the tetras and everyone will think it is a ghost 
Come on, I’d like to see some threads about POSITIVE things to do with the vision system. For example, I have NOT heard anyone talk about a vision system that ONLY looks down at the field floor and finds the shapes there (that happen to be UNDER every goal, loading station, etc.) Now that’s a neat trick…
[SOAPBOX]
I have ignored this thread for a while and am just appalled at the direction this thread had taken.
I agree completely with Dave. Teams will have enough problems with variations in ambient lighting and intended target coloring without confusing the issue. In fact, many teams will arrive at their competitions without having solved these issues. They will need our help.
It goes beyond rules, Gracious Professionalism or common sense…
Let me be clear on this. In my opinion, it would be rude, ignorant and vulgar for any team to intentionally or unintentionally color any component of their robot or driver/HP uniforms which even come close to interfering with the vision systems.
In the case of intentional interference at a competition, I promise that I will personally take that team’s leadership aside and have a discussion about the values and goals of technical education, FIRST, good sportsmanship, morality and a few subjects I haven’t thought of yet.
Please ask yourself “Why am I doing this?”.
I hope that I have made my point.
[/SOAPBOX]
I’m with the esteemed Mr. Lavery on this one. Intentionally screwing up other teams is clearly against the rules. As a senior mentor I need to know more about how the camera functions, how precise it is at picking up colors and shades, and how much it affects traditionally green teams like MOE, Swampthing, etc. so I can help the teams in my region. There is no need for any further conversation on what is or isn’t gracious professionalism. To most of us, that is obvious. If anyone wants to debate the GP of this situation, please PM me or call me, but keep it out of this thread so those who need the vital information can get it.
I’ll just say that the whole reason this is coming up is because the Q&A is unclear on this and frankly contradictory. Dave’s interpretation was, in fact, my original reading of R26. However, the answers to Q.981 and Q.982 say that nothing, nothing will be done to ensure that teams do not paint their robots or outfit their team in a color that can interfere with the vision system. No precautions will be taken or will need to be taken. Teams will not have to restrict the color that they paint their robot. These two answers seem crystal clear to me in the exact opposite direction. I will be more than happy to concede the point if FIRST changes these answers or clarifies them, but right now the Q&A says to me that I can paint my robot whatever color I like, however I like, including a vision tetra green panel.
As I’ve noted, I have a question in the Q&A that would answer this once and for all. I’ve put it there because I beleive the rules and Q&A are at odds now and that the Q&A answers in place make this strategy legal.
I’ll also note that I’m bringing it up because I’m certain that teams will be VERY highly annoyed if another team paints their robot green and distracts them from the tetra, even unintentionally. They will point to Q.981 and say that the Q&A says that they didn’t have to worry about green robots running around the field. I think there needs to be some real definitive stuff here instead of two one word answers.
The rules are still the final arbiter of what is legal. Unless and until a team update changes the rule making intentional disruption of the vision system illegal, intentionally disrupting the vision system is illegal.
The Q&A doesn’t say teams can relax and not worry about green robots. It merely says that the officials aren’t going to insist on a team repainting its robot. That should tell you that you do have to consider the possibility of there being a green robot on the field.
Intent isn’t so simple a question.
R26 could be construed in two separate ways, depending on how lawyerly you were feeling that day.
If you painted your robot in such a manner as to confuse the robot’s sensors, you would be acting in a forbidden matter.
However, it could be argued that, if you didn’t change the color, and you knew your color would throw off the opposing robot, it could be convincingly argued that you were intentionally and dangerously negligent.
It’s all in how they determine “the spirit of the rules”.
–Petey
Not necessarily–
My question only asks whether or not there will be precautions taken against it, or whether precautions need to be taken against it. There may be no rules that forbid teams outside of R26, but they may still enforce R26.
Just a thought.
As I’ve noted, I have a question in the Q&A that would answer this once and for all. I’ve put it there because I beleive the rules and Q&A are at odds now and that the Q&A answers in place make this strategy legal.
Please cite–wording, and ID, so I can check.
I’ll also note that I’m bringing it up because I’m certain that teams will be VERY highly annoyed if another team paints their robot green and distracts them from the tetra, even unintentionally. They will point to Q.981 and say that the Q&A says that they didn’t have to worry about green robots running around the field. I think there needs to be some real definitive stuff here instead of two one word answers.
I agree.
–Petey
Dave and Rich,
I guess no one is listening as the discussion continues. So I will add my two cents…
If you have never played around with color cameras or you have never played around with color object recognition or you have never studied reflected light in a component video world, then please stop posting about this subject. Veterans and rookies alike need useful data about camera operation and rule interpretation. The rules as Dave has pointed out, are not open for interpretation, GP or not.
If you have several hours of hard data using this camera recognizing the shape and color objects on the field (including field lighting) and would like to share, please do.
Al, Dave–
I think teams are worried, more than anything else, that if they paint their robot green, blue, red, or yellow (as their team colors normally are), and they unintentionally interfere with the operation of an opposing video camera, they will be excused of operating with ulterior motives.
They are seeking pre-decoration clarification, not pre-emptive absolution.
I will see if the Controls subteam on my team can record some video data quickly so we can get some more information about this.
–Petey
Excellent, we all need hard data about the camera, it’s capabilities, and how this will play out for most teams. People are appropriately concerned, but we need to know of the real issues and how to resolve them. Squabbling about what’s right (when it’s obvious to most) is a waste of time and space. Let’s see real, credible data about what the camera can do with colors and shapes and the reliability/repeatability of its function during autonomous mode. Thanks Al and Dave for getting this back on track. Stick to the camera and how it works so this thread is fully useful to teams. The clock is ticking and we all need answers, so get to work … and have fun too.
Let’s move this MEANINGFUL conversation to the programming forum… two good threads are already started about the camera. Post your technical data/questions there. Al has already posted there and so have others. Thanks.