FRC Beta

The first preview release of GRIP for FRC beta teams.

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GRIP is a tool for developing computer vision algorithms interactively rather than through trial and error coding. With GRIP, you choose vision operations to create a graphical pipeline. You can use GRIP with a webcam, an IP camera like the Axis camera, or sample images, so you don't have to rely on having physical access to a robot to test your algorithm.

GRIP is based on OpenCV, one of the most popular computer vision software libraries used for research, robotics, and vision algorithm implementations. The low-level operations that are available in GRIP are almost a one-to-one match with the operations available in OpenCV, but with instant feedback on what they do. In addition, some high-level operations are provided for easy learning and convenience. Let us know in the FRC TeamForge page if there are more features you'd like to see.

Tested operating systems:

• Windows 7
• Windows 10
• Fedora 23
• Ubuntu 15.04
• Mac OS X

Documentation

See the the wiki for documentation (in progress).

There is also a quick getting started guide on the FRC ScreenSteps.

Here's an incomplete list of things you can do in GRIP right now:

• Add sources from images on your computer, webcams, and IP cameras
• Add OpenCV and other high-level computer vision operations
• Connect outputs and inputs of operations together to form an image processing pipeline
• Manipulate the parameters to any step using graphical controls such as sliders and checkboxes
• Preview any output at any point in the pipeline

This isn't quite enough to use for a competition yet, but it should be functional enough to get a feel for how GRIP works.

Notes

This is an early release, and some features are currently missing. So you don't waste your time trying to find a feature that we haven't actually implemented yet, here are some of the major ones that haven't been finished.

• You cannot save or load a project
• Your cannot publish results to NetworkTables (or any other protocol)
• Many higher-level feature detection functions don't exist

Please post defects, suggestions, and other discussions to the issue tracker or to the FRC 2016 Beta TeamForge! We need feedback on what features to add and what bugs to fix.