I had coded an entire object recognition system from scratch to allow us to find and pick up the balls, but when we realized how short 10 seconds really was, I had to take it off the robot. 
I will, however, be incorporating it into our demo bot. You can stop by and see it in action in our pit!
You were able to get your system to recognize balls using the camera? Didn’t you run into the same issues as we did last year with tetras and the ambient lighting issues? I’m curious how you were able to find the balls with the camera since they are half one color, half another, and there are multiple colors. Very cool idea though, but like you said, 10 seconds is a very short time. Either way, great thought process!
Yes, it was recognizing balls very well! 
I actually invented a couple algorithms used on it that allowed me to track mutilple objects of multiple colors, and pick the closest one.
If you get the time ever, that would be an awesome white paper to write up. I’m sure with something like that, you’d give Lavery some pretty interesting ideas for the game next year. If you get around to writing that up, I’d send it over to him because I’m sure he’ll love the idea.
You know, if you wrote enough software with image recognition like that, you could have a fully autonomous robot…
That was some of the impetus behind creating this sytem… 
I have posted a demonstration video here:
I am proceeding with plans to market a derivative of this system sometime this year. See http://www.falconir.com for a teaser…
