CompuServe Messages

Michael, >>do you recall the exact formula for camera focal length and FOV… Yes, but there's a little more to it. I took the liberty of zipping and EMAILing the entire thread to you – it has Yost's explaination as well as a description of what we found in the lab. There are also some comments as to what I did with the 3DS model. Basically, I built a model of a part that didn't exist and rendered a series of images which were used as the basis for developing the image processing code used to control the robot. It saved a lot of money by simulating the hardware instead of building it. The client (and the project manager!) was well pleased, and a larger project resulted from the initial efforts. We are buying a recordable laser disk for the next phase of this project. I plan to render a huge database of images representing every reasonable camera position and store these images on laser disk. The vision computer will look at an image and decide which way to move the robot arm. A second computer will simulate the arm movement, pull a new image from the database, and send it to the vision computer. This way, we can simulate the entire process, easily adding environmental conditions and modifying the robot hardware configuration and appearance as desired. Check your email for the camera thread file… JKJ