Robots and Cameras
by Darren V.
On November 14, 2009, as teams throughout the region began to gear up for the new FIRST Robotics Competition season, Bear Metal was invited to the pre-season workshop at Bonney Lake High School to conduct three sessions on using the video camera from the robot parts kit provided by FIRST. The workshop is held each year and is typically attended by students, mentors, and anyone else interested in being involved with FRC at the team level. It's an opportunity for rookie teams to learn about FIRST, and for all the participants to learn from each other.
Matt C. is our programmer most experienced with cameras. Matt, along with Mr. Collins (our advisor) and Darren V., presented the knowledge we have gained while using cameras over three years of competition. We showed videos from all those years of our robots using a camera in competition.
Following the competition videos, we talked about how camera performance depends each year on the game. The first game we played in, "Rack 'N' Roll", our camera worked well for us and we stood out from other teams during autonomous mode. In our second year ("FIRST Overdrive"), we weren't able to capitalize as well on our camera's capabilities. However, last year ("Lunacy"), our camera again allowed us to perform well during autonomous mode.
Besides talking about when to use a camera, we showed how to use LabVIEW (the programming environment for the robot controller) to program a robot and camera, and how to tweak camera settings from LabVIEW. We also talked about resources available to FIRST teams from National Instruments, the maker of LabVIEW.
After the presentation, we took questions from the audience, and gave a demonstration of Bearenstein (our "Lunacy" robot) using the camera.