Doug Conn wrote:
> I tried this technique with the camera and laser in my tank. It worked
> pretty well in low light and short ranges. In full daylight, though, the
> laser point was not identifiable in the camera frame.
Ahhh ... the wonderfully subtle technical problems posed by The Pittelli
X-Prize begin to reveal themselves. Despite all the TV shows and
YouTube videos showing a multitude of apparently simple techniques for
range finding, the reality is that reality is a bitch and the
battlefield is not your workshop or laboratory.
Even if you got a more powerful laser or a CCD that was tuned for the
laser, would the simple trig approach still work for something 50 feet
away? If you crank the numbers for targeting something 2 feet wide, at
a range of 50 feet, with a co-axial distance of at most 2 feet (between
the camera lense and the laser), what pixel resolution do you need to
tell when that object has moved 3 feet forward or backward?
RE: Radar ranging: In the U.S., the FCC limits the power output of
commercial wide-spectrum radar devices so that the maximum realistic
motion detection range is about 25 feet. Government devices can be more
powerful, but sale of those devices is restricted.
BTW: Feel free to cross-post the existence of The Pittelli X-Prize to
all of the autonomous robot mailing lists and forums. You'll probably
get lots of wonderful ideas from them, but I seriously doubt any of the
thousands of autonomous roboteers will actually take up the challenge.
After reading it, they'll just go back to building their desktop "bug
walkers" and LEGO-based contraptions, to impress their non-technical
friends and family.
Frank P.
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