Home

WhyCon Manual

What is WhyCon?

WhyCon is mainly a localization system targeted for mobile robotics, although it can be used to track pose of any arbitrary target. The system is capable of precise and efficient tracking of several targets. This can be used as a source for ground-truth data for experiments or for on-line pose information. WhyCon has gained popularity due to its simplicity, low setup time and the fact that it works well with cheap USB webcameras.

WhyCon is proposed as an alternative to widely used and expensive localization systems. It is fully open-source. Nowadays, WhyCon is used in robotic labs in Asia, Europe and Americas for projects ranging from formation control, long-term learning, swarm and bioinspired robotics.

How does it work?

The base of the localization system is an efficient circular target (ring or roundel) detector. This efficiency allows for detection of hundred of targets above camera frame-rate. The targets can be easily printed on a B&W printer. A single target allows for obtaining 5DoF (3D position + 2 angles). When constrained on planar (ground) motions, the precision can be further improved.

For implementation details, see upcoming article presented at ICAR2013.

How do I use it?

See a step-by-step tutorial here. Technical details and reference are available here

Roadmap (or: will you add support for X?)

Several features are being worked on and others are considered for extensions to the current algorithm. You can see the roadmap here.