After discussions, team 5179 would like to use a kind of overlay on top of a front camera, similar to Dodge cars’s rear cam lines,
to help our drivers aligning the robot on the field with all the obastacles that are on the field this year. I have experience with NI Vision. Can someone help me figuring out a solution? I saw this thread, from 2011, but I’d like to know if someone has a better solution. As far as I know, dodge uses sensor on both sizes of their cars, but the lines are a simple overlay on top of the camera screen. As any other team done something similar?
Alexandre Croteau
Senateurs 5179
Coding team (Java RoboRIO, specialized in autonomous)
Are you looking for a static overlay, or something that will change dynamically based on what the driver is doing or the camera is seeing? If you use the smart dashboard, it’s easy to add a static image that you can position over the camera feed. I’m unfamiliar with NI Vision, our team used OpenCV in a custom camera widget on the smart dashboard for dynamic overlays (https://github.com/Mercury1089/MercuryWidget here’s an example custom camera widget).
I was looking for static overlay, I will look forward into a widget. Dynamic image might also be useful, so thank you for the idea. Also, do someone here have an idea in how to calculate the angle of a such line, knowing that the camera will be placed once and not moved afterward. I have a simple idea, which could work but is long to set up. I could simply put a peg or similar with a rope attached to the robot and make it go forward to verify the perspective and draw a line over the rope, using it as the overlay, but I would like to know if there is a math way to calculate the perspective angle knowing that the camera will be placed directly in the middle of the robot. I think it would be related to vectors, but I am not really good in this aspect of maths. Can someone help?
Alexandre Croteau
Senateurs 5179
Coding team (Java RoboRIO, specialized in autonomous)
If you’re looking for a static overlay, I would try a transparent png file on top of the camera window in smartdashboard. Never done it but it might work, not near a computer right now to try it
