Ran across an interesting video. Could anyone incorporate this for a promotional video/showcase??
Looks really cool. Do you know how it works?
Someone knew this year’s game and sent me the link. I have no other knowledge/personal involvement with the project.
The video shows the iterations they went through to make it work. It’s a camera mounted on top of a frisbee with a well-balanced central bearing. A fin attached to the rotating camera assembly keeps it pointed in the direction of the disc’s travel.
Looks like they rely on the fin aerodynamics to keep the camera oriented in the right direction.
An interesting but completely different approach might be to try using a fixed camera and synchronize the shutter to the rotation using a gyro, or use computer vision to align the video to a non-spinning frame of reference like these guys. Disadvantage of these methods is your max frame rate is dependent on the spin rate (given the results from this year’s FRC, this may be less of an issue if a robot is the one throwing the discs ;)).
While I doubt this could make it through most robot’s feeding mechanism (or the feeder slot), it would be pretty awesome to see a robot load and fire a disc into a goal from the disc’s point of view. I’d be afraid of breaking the camera against the goal, but it would almost be worth it!
It seems like a lot of the full-court shots were landing more gently, so maybe get an FCS to do it?. That would be a more interesting video than a 200ms shot from beneath the pyramid as well.
Those whould be hard to shoot… Really cool idea.