Looking at the kick-off video and seeing the vision tetra’s ,ones that are placed on the Field that weigh 12.5 lbs, the color on them is red or blue and green panels. my question is What if your Robot is one of those colors, like my team MOE 365 is, will that affect the the sensors on the robots and lead them away from the tetras and to wards our bot or are the sensors “smart enough” to to not do that?
My guess would be that the robot itself could become the target if the colors were close enough. It would be best to find another color for the robot this year.
As stated in this thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=32226 , and in the manual:
<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).
I think that MOE green is different enough from tetra green that the vision system should know the difference, but I dont know how precise the sensors are.
Eric
not to sound rude or anything at all, but why should we change our colors that our team, and others have used, since 2000 now? also any team that has red or blue can have the same thing happen and those are very common robot colors. I had another question, will the sensors see other colors that are close to red, blue or green and mistake them? if that is the case then many team colors might have to be changed on there bots this year
Once again I am not trying to sound argumentative or anything I am just trying to get a good interpretation of the new rules and if our color might cause a problem on the field then it may have to change.
What do you mean by changing for the sole purpose of messing up the senors? We’ve always been bright green and it is kind of like our signature, it definetly isn’t intentionally to mess up the sensors. By no means do we want to hinder any other teams performance on the field. One of the corner stone values that my team practices is GP.
We have to change the robot colors because it’s the rule. It’s not like the average team has already build the entire chassis, drive train, and has most of the plexiglass colored already, and now they’re being told they can’t use that color. It’s not really too much to ask for from the refs to tell you not to use a certain color on your robot, is it?
I was skimming the manual for the cameras and I dont think it will be a problem. You can set the thresholds of the color range that it looks for and as I recall, MOE green is a lot brighter than the tetras are.
Eric
I was thinking about this earlier. What are the odds that the robot will pick up on colors outside of the field? Suppose the root locks onto a person wearing green colors.
It is true that Moe green is a brighter shade of green i am just worried about the sensors still picking it up as the green on the feild and we could have 5 other bots comming at us instead of the tetras. also if a team sets there sensors to go to green and red/blue then teams with thoses colors could have problems. the thought just poped in to my head watching the kickoff and seeing team members wearing there MOE shirts. I guess we will find out for sure in the next week or so. Good luck to everyone this build.
Well, then they would be disqualified for leaving the field area…
What i ment by the 5 bots comming at us= our bot is the other robots comming at our bot on the feild. but that would be crazy if colors ourside the feild attracted the bots, could that also be a problem?
I doubt it. The color detection program probably has a limited operating range for detecting color. I.e., using english (I don’t know how the programming works this year with the customizable language:
If objectsize >3 Then gotoandpickup Else turncamera45degreeright
I suppose the trade off for not having those colors available for teams is that the field won’t be colored mustard yellow, or any other hideous shades. Besides the RGB spectrum is big, can’t we all just share nicely ;).
Once we get a robot running though, i guess my team will have to see how the colors interfere. My teams shirts a shade of red not that far from what is used. If enough of us clump together in the stands, some robots might do funny things. 
From what I’ve read about the CMU in the past, I think it just looks at the entire picture, finds a color, and feeds back the coordinates. Simple solution might be to use an IR ranger (or Ultrasound) if you can get it to work, so that you can set maximum ranges.
What I’m wondering about the cameras is how big of a deal would ambient light have on what it picks up as a set color? Say at home in what ever setting you are working in, say the correct green is defined at 3.5<x<3.7, or around that range, but in a match for what ever reason due to lighting used there the threshold gets knocked up to say 3.9<x<4.2? it will become hit or miss at times.
I know its kinda specific the ranges, but chances are if not the robot may track anything that could be considered at all greenish in its visual range
I’m wondering if the color sensors and “vision tetras” are another addition to the kit and rules that will be like last year’s IR stuff, and cause thousands of hours of peoples’ time to be spent trying to make them useful in playing the game, with little success. I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks.