Mac, eat your heart out!
Behold! It turns out that if you start with the proper background knowledge, this sort of thing is trivial, but no one seems to know where to begin learning about stuff like this.
Also, I’m going to be mentoring a high school robotics team this summer! Whee! I’m apparently going to be doing stuff on the software/vision side of things. They have really nice equipment, including a CMUCam2. It turns out that a $30,000 budget can buy a lot of neat toys.
Sweet! I never could find that damn package. Turns out CTAN is hard to use, who would have thought that?
Also, glad to hear that FIRST is actually doing robotics now, instead of the (damn cool) glorified remote-control cars we built when I did it.
FIRST Robotics is now kinda both – most of it is remote-controlled, but they have autonomous parts to it as well. The group I’m working with did FIRST for the first time this past year, and had no sensors on their robot: they used a very crude form of dead reckoning during the autonomous parts (they actually turned the motors on and off based on how much time had elapsed!), but this coming year they want to do more with sensors and autonomy.