In our journey towards robotic excellence, we realized that progress is impossible without quality feedback. Past attempts at analyzing our VEX robots during gameplay were hindered by poor video footage. Our mission became clear: to develop a specialized PTZ camera to capture every intricate detail of our robot's actions, as the details make all the difference.
While initially planning on a hardware system, we opted to completely focus on software to make ensure our camera would operate at the highest quality. Our goal was still ambitious, however, as there were numerous components we had to account for when designing the tracker. To provide clarity as to how we'd use the OpenCV library to create a motion-tracking algorithm, we broke this ambitious goal down into a series of manageable tasks.
Our tracker centers the robot on the screen by finding its position in relation to the center of the screen, moving accordingly. With this implemented, the camera pans and tilts in sync with our robot's movements, thanks to the tracked coordinates. We also created a zoom feature that automatically adjusts to frame our robot perfectly. By using the motion-tracking algorithm to calculate the position, we added a bounding box around our robot, zooming in to make our performance the focus of our recordings. Our final hurdle was fine-tuning the camera's responsiveness to align seamlessly with our robot's speed.
With tracking completed, we considered implementing more intelligent features such as analytics and statistics. We opted to track the amount of discs a robot scores in the 2022 VEX Robotics game: Spin Up. Other features we decided to track were the robot's speed, acceleration, and total distance traveled. Analytics such as this provide practicality to our camera, as the user can gain insight into their performance during robotics matches.
Ultimately, our goal is to generalize this software to track a variety of objects, going beyond the scope of VEX robotics. We hope to add a series of features to provide the user with feedback on performance or useful tools for tracking whatever the user may want. By advancing our PTZ camera, we will provide clarity like never before.
In the future, we plan to diversify the applications of GaelCamera. We hope GaelCamera can expand to accommodate a larger variety of games and competitions. Additionally, we plan to implement features we ran out of time for in this iteration. These include further game analysis, match scoring based on optimized criteria, and profiling teams over time based on GaelCamera’s analytics.
Initial identifier:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rlhDvT83_YcOzm_yrsoTZHVwqAeClesJ/view?usp=drive_link
Identifier Simulation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rRxhyAGj9-nbjsHGFwFtcn2ZANYoPvae/view?usp=drive_link
Basic Tracking + Zoom:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rlhDvT83_YcOzm_yrsoTZHVwqAeClesJ/view?usp=drive_linkSubmission Link:
https://watch.screencastify.com/v/KmqsQtTvmwQjSLwIsQAH
Our planning Diagram:
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