Robots

Our robot detection system is in Robots.cpp. It is a work in progress. Many teams detect robots by looking for places on the field with lots of white. Since white is so ubiquitous we take a different approach and look for the bands the robots wear. As with our other vision components we look for certain colors while scanning, in this case NAVYBLUE and RED (pink). After scanning we try and put these runs into regions. The trouble with this and robots is that NAVYBLUE is hard to work with. So we try and help by merging nearby regions of the same color. The result of this process are candidate regions that might signify the uniforms of a robot. As usual we run lots of sanity checks on these to be sure they are really parts of robots. Among them:

• Is there white above and below? In other words "are there robot bodies nearby?"
• Is the region the right general size and shape? We prefer wider than taller for example.

In the future I think we might want to adopt the "look for white" strategy. Or a "look for places where the field is blocked" strategy anyway.