Quote:
Originally Posted by yash101
I am taking an AI/ML course online. I am just wondering if it would be FEASIBLE (I know it is possible) to create a vision system that learns the game by itself?
While it would seem quite hard, instead of writing a different program every year, it could be possible to write one program to play each game.
Such a program would need to be taught the game, what it needs to do. However, it would also need to learn how to use itself.
The last question I have is, has this ever been done? It seems extremely hard so it would be pointless to reinvent the wheel.
What would be the best environment to build something like this in? Currently, I am learning with Octave, however, OpenCV seems to have a lot of useful components, including the ML module.
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Before you decide to do something like this, you need to consider what your goal is. If the goal is become more competitive, I can guarantee that time could be spent better improving another aspect of the team.
However, if your primary goal is not to do as well as you can at the competition, and instead is to learn about programming, which is a valid goal, then I would recommend realizing how big of a project this would actually be. You are not the first person to want to do something like this, a user named davidthefat had a similar goal. He, and a few other teams, pledged to do a fully autonomous robot for the upcoming season, which never happened.
Look at the Cheesy Poofs. They've won events every year they've been around, they've been on einstein a bunch, they've been world champs, they win the innovation in controls award, and their autonomous mode is very, very complicated. Their code, which can be viewed
here, is well beyond the level of high school kids, and is the result of a few really brilliant kids, some very smart and dedicated mentors, and years and years of building up their code base. Yet all this fancy software lets them do is drive in a smooth curved path. Even then, it's not perfect. In the second final match of Einstein, something didn't go right, and they missed.
Just to get an idea for the scope of the project, read through
these classes from the Cheesy Poof's code. My friend does this sort of programming for a living, and it took him a good hour of reading the pathgenerator and spline portions of the code to really get a good understanding of what's going on. I wouldn't attempt this project unless that code seems trivial to write and easy to understand.
Before even thinking about making software to let the robot learn or software for the robot to learn about its surroundings, you'd need to perfect something as simple as driving.
As an exercise, try making an autonomous mode that drives the robot in a 10 foot diameter circle. It's much harder than you think.
Again, I'm not trying to be harsh or discouraging, I'm trying to be realistic. A piece of software that can do the tasks you've described is beyond the reach of anyone.
Another very difficult exercise is figuring out where the robot is on the field and which way it is pointing. You can't just "use a gyro", there's much more to it.