Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

As far as technology goes it would be cool to have CVT's in the kit. CVT's are not only found in cars and snowmobiles, they are also found in mini scooters. These CVT's happen to be the perfect size and cost for a first robot.

Scooter CVT
Scooter CVT

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

Cool find. I wonder if they work in reverse as well as forward?

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

As has been mentioned, it would be very difficult to execute a decent autonomous at the end of a match, because you do'nt know where you are. This year we used radios that were on telescoping tripods at the corner of the playing field. I am not sure how this might be done, but if radios were placed at the 4 corners of the field, you could effectively have a FPS, Field Positioning System. With a program that splits the field up into a coordinate plane, you can just access maybe two variables, and get your position. Depending on how you did it, you might be able to get your position to within a few inches, maybe 1 foot blocks would work. Some inventive person elaborate please, I want FPS! :)

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

Alright, now here's a technology I wouldn't mind seeing in the kit (or at least being made explicitly legal):

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...4&page=1&pp=15

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

Im not that inventive of a person, but I'll try:

With any three of the radios metioned above, you could triangulate (read: use trig) to find your robot's position on the field. Then, depending on how good your programming team is, you may or may not be able to tell the robot during auton to go from hereA to hereB to hereC and between B and C raise the arm and at C drop the arm to cap the tetra.

With a really inventive group, you might even be able to write a sensor-controlled program to pick the shortest plausible route to the next destination if you have programmed in the locations of various field elements as line segments not to be crossed by the path of the robot (ie, make sure that the lines never intersect. The robot may need to have two paths drawn for it, though, because it is not as thin as the one path line that is easy to program for. And for a challenge, one might be able to use touch and/or light sensors to avoid other robots in the middle of competition. That, I dont know any details of. Anyone who actually knows what I'm talking about care to elaberate?

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

What would be really interesting is to have a field with one very difficult obstruction, perhaps only capable of having one or two robots on it, much like the 2004 field. On this obstacle are game pieces, which are easily given to alliance members, or are worth more points, once the obstacle is tackled.

On the actual field there are low point game pieces, are perhaps they are slow to obtain. In this way inter-team communication is very important in order to transfer the high point or plentiful pieces to a scoring position. In this way lone rangers wouldn't be the ones dominating the field; the important players would constantly be switching places.

Re: [Official 2006 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions
 

In a bit of cicular thread linking, the following post
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...53&postcount=1
sparked a lot of discussion on that thread. (Nut shell description of post) Charmed Labs and Rich LeGrand has designed a robot controller using a Gameboy interface which can autononously control a robot using no electronic sensors. It uses the back emf generated by the motors.

Innovation FIRST , FIRST , & Charmed need to get together with National Instruments & CMU to work up a kit bot interface that can do this out of the box. It also has a newer and improved vision camera on this lego robot. I saw one demonstrated by Rich in person yesterday. Really very cool. Our school district is working on implementing Botball with this new robot at our middle schools. FIRST is going to have to step up the game or my future students are going to complain how easy it was in middle school to do this and now they have to buy encoders, write code, and .... :yikes:

Make sure you view some of the video dl of the robot.