Hi,
I was thinking of off-season programming projects when I came across a cool looking car feature. On some cars, you can toggle a “virtual birds-eye view”](http://r1.forconstructionpros.com/files/base/FCP/image/2014/11/16x9/640x360/brigade_smarteye360cameradisplay.53f77730a01a1.546e0f327a6f2.jpg) .
Would this be worth putting time into to develop for an FRC robot? I think it would be cool, but I don’t know if you have a short robot, would you have enough of an angle for the cameras?
Thanks!
A coworker has a BMW with this feature. I guess it has ultra-wide-angle cameras mounted in strategic locations and the processor stitches the imagery together to form a 360-degree view of what’s around the car. The image gets very distorted as you “look up” from the immediate area surrounding the car, but that’s the important zone anyway.
I think this could be a cool project for sure! I’d sure love to build a version of this for my car…
I actually messed around with this at work, trying to get it ported to a FRC environment.
I was using a Qualcomm snapdragon reference board (disclaimer, I work there and happened to have one on my desk). The main reason why I used that was to easily perform the matrix transformations to unwarp and change perspectives on 4 images.
I attempted to throw the same code on the roborio since our team was limited by constraints and didn’t have room/space/weight for additional hardware to support the board.
We quickly ran into a USB bandwidth issue and decided not to pursue it further. It was a fun exercise and a good introduction into linear algebra and some calculus for our kids.
If you want to give it a whirl, I highly recommend looking at this white paper. http://delphi.com/docs/default-source/old-delphi-files/ca6584db-54ec-46f4-be65-5f5b60e65189-pdf.pdf?sfvrsn=0
Fun fact: We also got it working just by using WebGL with some javascript to pull in 4 images. That’s one way to take advantage of a high performance GPU found in your laptop!
