FRC Team 114 Preliminary Camera Filter for Rebound Rumble 2012

This is our first filtering attempt on the retro-reflective square for the 2012 FIRST Robotics Competition game. We are shining a bright flashlight on the material which makes it appear very bright on camera, even from about 50 feet away. We are using Microsoft Kinect for video input and XNA Game Studio / HLSL to do the image filtering.

This is a very preliminary test and stay tuned for even better detection!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• FIRST Robotics Competition
• 114
• camera filter
• image processing
• computer vision
• FRC 114
• Rebound Rumble
• XNA

[coolnerdguy1353]

@ataiwo473 You will most likely need some form of separate processor to connect the USB webcams to. We are using an hp mini 1000 netbook but another programmer has suggested using FitPC, a small pc that runs linux (i think). You most likely will not be getting the processing power you need on an arduino. Image processing burns many CPU cycles

[coolnerdguy1353]

that rule only says that you can't have another device DIRECTLY controlling motors. It's totally fine to have a co-processor that sends information to the cRIO. Other teams we know have been using co-processors for years.

[coolnerdguy1353]

you cannot connect the kinect to cRIO, we are going to have a netbook on our robot that will do all the image processing so we will connect the kinect to that through USB. We actually just bought 2 hd webcams that we will be using instead

[ataiwo473]

We need a USB host device unless anybody here wants to re-implement the USB protocol from scratch. And I'm wondering if any rule savvy people here know what kinda of things we can put on the robot. I was thinking it would be best to put something like an arduino or such on the robot that would handle all image manipulation or point detection and would send the rest of the results back to the DriverStation either by the Network or a Digital Input. Does anybody know if thats legal?

[WildcatRobotics3540]

@madscienti11 He probably means kinect connects to netbook, netbook connected to DLINK, Crio connected to Dlink.

[madscienti11]

Yo, coolnerdguy, your netbook idea is a no-go, R52.

[wilsonmw04]

sadly, I don't think you can use the Kinect to the cRIO.

[Hellocommenters]

Are we actually allowed to use the kinect on-board the robot? If so, how do you connect the USB into the cRio?

[rexcorsetto]

Super helpful.  Thanks guys!