Accessing the Camera Motion Abilities

General Information

The idea behind moving the camera is simple and easy to accomplish. For each instance of a robot one needs to interact with the camera effector. All the camera control functions can be accessed through that object, which is located in the pioneer agent.

Panning Information

In order to pan the camera from -90 degrees to +90 degrees you need to call the following function:

      public void pan     (double degree);

The function takes a double representing the degree, thus as an example 45.0 is valid. To call this function one simple needs to have use some form of the following code segment:

      robot.myCameraEffector.pan(45.0);

If one makes several motion calls to the camera, you need to make sure that the command has enough time to complete. The following series of commands will result in the camera making a jerky motion and then panning 10 degrees.

    robot.myCameraEffector.pan(-10);  //pan 10 degrees to the left
    robot.myCameraEffector.pan(10);   //pan back to center
    robot.myCameraEffector.pan(10);   //pan 10 degrees to the right
    robot.myCameraEffector.pan(-10);  //pan back to center
    robot.myCameraEffector.pan(10);   //pan 10 degrees to the right

Tilting Information

Tilting has it's own method that also takes the degrees to tilt. The input to the function is between -20 degrees and +20 degrees.

      public void tilt    (double degree);

Zooming Information

As with the other functionalities zoom has it's own method. The method is defined as :

      public void zoom    (int amount);  //number 0-1024: 0 is wide, 1024 is tele

Panning and Tilting as One

It is possible to combine panning and tilting into one command for speed and efficiency. The method takes two angles, the amount to pan and the amount to tilt. It is defined as follows

      public void panTilt (double pan, double tilt);