Chief Delphi - Infared in Next Year's Game

Quote:

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

[pseudolite] literally means pseudo-satellite, as in a land based GPS system. This link explians the pseudolite research being done at Stanford for such projects as NASA's Rovers.

This is VERY cool stuff... (and similar to a project I was once involved in...)

For another technique, see the ham APRS project (http://aprs.org)

Too bad APRS uses GPS, which is unusable in this context. (Indoors, too small an area, etc.) However the IDEA of smart packet transcevers exchanging position info (used by both systems) is VERY interesting, and could be exploited by IFI. Think about it. We already HAVE a packet modem system with the eWave modems, so something may be able to be done at the ARENA level, to inject information into the loop. There may be some way to combine these technologies.

Unfortunately, making TOO smart of an arena (e.g. having the ARENA calculate our position from our robot's eWave transmission with lots of arena hardware, and sending the position data back TO us) is probably NOT a good idea. You'd have to include "arena simulation parts" in the kit for testing, and you REALLY don't want the kits any more expensive than they are now. Too many teams (esp rookies) have enough trouble just getting their ROBOT work in the six weeks, let alone making more. :D

The only way I'd see a Smart Arena Game be feasable is if:

(A) The EduBot CPU could emulate the ENTIRE arena's contribution with VERY simple additional hardware (just like this year with the beacons), or

(B) A simple and cheap PIC project (preprogrammed PIC and PCB) be included in the kit that does the "smart arena" thing for you, similar to the "current sensor project".

BTW, speaking of PICs... One of our mentors whipped up a dual beacon waveform generator on a tiny "couple of buck PIC" to free up the EduBot CPU. Code was REALLY dirty, but it WAS done quickly with one of the freebie PIC C compilers. It acted as one beacon, with a slave LED/Transistor board for the other. Worked well, but we never used it because we dropped whole the beacon navigation approach.

However, it only took a couple of days to whip up, and (other than the PCB) cost < $10 in parts, so it was a GREAT Proof of Concept for (B) above... If we ever get out from under our OTHER projects, we may consider writing it up for the whitepaper area sometime this summer.

- Keith