You can find the tutorial with all the code and such in samples/Simulation Tutorials/Advanced/Multiple Simulated Sensors wherever your MRDS directory is.

Also, if you have the MRDS pdf textbook, there's a simulated magellan tutorial that does image processing (recognizing yellow cones, from what i skimmed through). It looks really good. Around page 400.

***EDIT***
I decided to just reinstall instead of wasting time trying to fix it...
**********

Hello all...

My simulation environment has decided to not listen to port 50000 once again. This is exactly what happened last time. The program is working fine and suddenly, I try to run a simulation and I get this error:

*** Initialization failure: Could not start HTTP Listener.
The two most common causes for this are:
1) You already have another program listening on the
specified port
2) You dont have permissions to listen to http requests.
Use the httpreserve command line utility to run using a non-administrator
account.

And after that error you may get two messages:
Exception message: Access is denied OR Only one usage of each socket
address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.

Being a very lucky individual, I have received both errors. The access denied means I am not the administrator (EVEN THOUGH I AM!) and the second one means another thing is already listening to port 50000. I used netstat -a -p tcp in command prompt to check which services are listening to 50000 and 50001 and there ARE none! Then I do everything http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd939179.aspx tells me to do and I just keep going back and forth between those errors. -.- And sometimes when I try to remove 50000's reservation it won't let me: "unable to remove port 50000". THIS IS KILLING ME!! Last time this happened, I had to uninstall and reinstall MVS and MRDS...don't tell me I have to do that again. ANY FORM OF HELP WILL BE APPRECIATED! PREFERABLY IF YOU CAN COME IN AND FIX IT IN PERSON.

Thank you in advance,
Tina

Hi guys,

I was reading through the rules and such thoroughly today and discovered that we have to take care of IR filtering if necessary ourselves. That is, if the sun is opposite to us, it could slightly blind our camera. I'm not sure if this is really an area of concern or if it doesn't really affect the image processing, but I just wanted to make sure you guys know about this.
-Also, it appears that they expect us to use headlights in the tunnel because it says on the website something along the lines of "it will be difficult to navigate through the tunnel without the usage of headlights"; something along those lines. Tunnel will be painted black on the inside and the outside, so maybe we can help our robot go in the tunnel by sending it some kind of signal when it detects a huge black blob.
-We are also allowed to place objects outside the drag race track (drag race is just a straight, long track) or at the end of the track to help our robot find its way. We are not allowed to use orange objects (because they look like pylons) but we can use a big blue circle or something to guide "Da Boss" (who came up with that name?!?).
-In addition, the race will occur under light rain/drizzle conditions but not if its heavy rain. Not sure how rain will affect image processing, but probably not much?
-Also, we don't have to worry about the traffic light if we can figure out how to program our robot to correspond to its time sequence, which is 3s pause after start, then 90s GREEN, 30s RED, 90s GREEN, 30s RED and repeating. Or it might just be easier to detect red/green blobs.
-Finally, if we're pointing our LRF or camera down, we may be faced with difficulties when we go up inclines ("there may be inclines of less than 15% (i think they mean degrees) on the track") because we won't be able to see as wide of a view.

That's it for now.
Tina

Simulation for Brendan's code is now working. We did the following to get the simulation working:

1. We used MRDS R3 as opposed to R2.

2. If you have a x64 Win, then you have to use dsshost32.exe to run the simulation.

3. Make sure you have all the missing .dll's that Brendan had.

Soren/Tina

I started doing some services tutorials. When you go to the control panel, you find a list of all the services available on MRDS. Here are some that look promising for image processing:

- "Blob Tracker" :"Description: Finds specific blobs (regions) within an image for simple color tracking."
- ColorSegment: "Description: The ColorSegment Service"
- Explorer: "Description: Provides access simple exploration behavior for a robot using a differential drive, bumpers, and a laser range finder."
- Follower: "Description: Provides access to a set of services that support simple visual tracking, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and obstacle avoidance."
- Ip Camera: "Description: Provides access to an IP camera." [Note: not sure what an IP camera is but =/ ]
- Math Functions: "Description: Provides access to simple mathematical functions."
- Microsoft GPS-360: "Description: Provides GPS data in NMEA 0183 output format."
- Webcam: "Description: Captures images from an attached camera."

Tina

Scroll all the way down for a list of 15 free tutorials:

http://idealprogrammer.com/videos/microsoft-robotics-development-studio-...

Here's what Zongyi said:
"...
Hello. I have my own VFH code but it is untested. I do not know how well it will perform if at all, so I moved to looking at coreSlam from openSlam. Out of all the methods on openSlam, it looked the most promising for the laser rangefinder, but after downloading the code and looking through it, I realized that I have very little clue on how to use it.

I also tried doing some simulations in Robotics Studio, but it hasn't been too fruitful. I'm feeling that I'm reading the wrong tutorials. There are tutorials that involve real robots and interactions with buttons and such, and then there are simulation tutorials. I have been doing a lot of simulation tutorials, and so far I can't seem to get it to work. I'm having obscure problems like Visual Studio not having the "DSS New Service wizard". In addition, looking far ahead into the tutorial I'm following, there doesn't even seem to be a place where I can place my code, so I'm pretty lost here.

It would probably save a lot of time if someone who has already got it to work would write a short readme or something listing the steps they took.

At the moment, I moved away from debugging my own code or trying to wrestle with robitics studio. Instead, I'm currently trying to figure out how to use the openSlam coreSlam code.

Zongyi
..."

Heres a good starting point for MRDS. Unfortunately, the Microsoft tutorials are rather inadequate. There is a series of 3 on the following website beginning with the one linked. The third tutorial is where the bulk of the useful code is and shows you how powerful MRDS can really be.

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/32729

brendanW

Make sure you briefly go over C# before you start the tutorial!

Good tutorial for C#

http://www.functionx.com/csharp/index.htm (the chapters are on the left side)

There's some interesting tutorials on Simple Vision, which is included in MSRS.

Quoting Jessica Xie:
"Here's how you do it:

You open Microsoft DSS Manifest Editor-> Click Help -> Click Contents -> Samples -> Technology Samples-> C#

You should be able to find all the samples."

It would be a good idea to take a look and follow the steps in the tutorials.

Good luck,
Tina

Everyone, please post where you are with the robotics studio and update us frequently. This way everyone can know what everyone else is doing and if anyone is ahead, we can learn from that person.

Thank you.

This is what Joe has found for image processing:

Quoting Joe:
>> - Spent some hours on http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (.NET wrapper for Open CV) and had problems >> with build errors I could not fix.
>> - Spent a little time on http://www.aforgenet.com/ .NET Computer Vision library & the samples worked fine, so >> at this point I like it better. Starting to explore functionality.

I remember Joe mentioned the Multimedia Lab in the meeting. I'm not sure of their willingness to help us, but I'll look into it.

Soren