Potential vision alternatives? (To limelight)

Our team was considering using tensorflow to facilitate our need for vision. Has anyone used tensorflow effectively before in FRC? And if so, video?(Rookie team)

Has anyone? Probably. That doesn’t mean you should try it in the rookie build season. I would search up Chameleon vision. It’s a budget limelight.

I did a loooot of ML vision back in the day (video), and I can say pretty definitely that you’d be hard pressed to successfully implement ML in FRC. For just about every task this year, there’s going to be a much simpler and more robust solution utilizing traditional CV techniques.

Big +1 on Chameleon vision.

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There’s plenty of great alternatives to limelight that are equal if not better in quality with minimal extra setup/learning curve. You can do a loooot of stuff in FRC with thresholding/OpenCV functions without even touching ML, and for a rookie team I’d strongly recommend setting up a Raspberry Pi (other coprocessors work although the rpi is probably the best supported in FRC), a usb camera (I recommend the PS Eye but any webcam will do) and a green ringlight/array of LEDS with FRCVision, Chameleon, OpenSight, or even just your own OpenCV + NetworkTables python script.

We have already created an OpenCV script (shape detector) but it not nearly accurate enough. How would we be able to accurately target the hexagon using OpenCV? The created script was simply searching for objects with six contuors.

Hopefully you are using some kind of light to illuminate the vision target. If so, hopefully you are doing some kind of HSV thresholding; you can add other filters and adjust exposure/brightness in addition but any contour detection becomes immensely easier from there. I’m not in charge of our vision team so I’m not 100% knowledgeable though…

Are you using the RPI? If so using a prebaked solution like Chameleon or Opensight is prefered for sure, even veteran teams use these.

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You should be using a bright green LED to illuminate the vision target located on the bottom 3 edges of the hexagon. Ensure to look at the vision tracking guides and examples from docs.wpilib.org. The two pertaining to locating vision targets are here:

https://docs.wpilib.org/en/latest/docs/software/vision-processing/introduction/target-info-and-retroreflection.html

and here

https://docs.wpilib.org/en/latest/docs/software/vision-processing/introduction/identifying-and-processing-the-targets.html

I highly recommend reading both of those and taking a bit more time to explore docs.wpilib.org’s variety of resources.

Please read section 3.7 of the 2020 FRC Game Manual for information on the shape/dimensions of the vision targets for this season.

Also, as you are a rookie team, you should probably just buy a Limelight if you have the available funds. Manually implementing vision might be a better idea for next season. It is difficult, and even some of the absolute best software teams (254 comes to mind) use Limelights because they are just so nice to use.

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