Hmm, If i had to guess, the fastest time we will see will be around 3 seconds. Maybe we will see high 2 seconds, MAYBE. But I seriously doubt it.
I figure that it is about 30 feet from the wall to the ball, if a fast robot travels at about 10 feet/second, we're looking at about 3 secs.
We max out at about 8-9 ft/sec so it would take us about 3.5 secs to knock the ball off.
Everything depends on the form of sensing, line trackers will take the longest at about 10-15 secs, IR tracking will be about 8-12 seconds, inertial guidance will take about 4-6 secs (depending on the skill of the programmers) that will be followed by dead reckoning and encoder based systems which I will predict will be the fastest. This is all of course dependant on the skillz of the programmers and the hardware design.
I would guess, that depending on practice and skill, encoder and inertial systems will be tied for the fastest systems. Combinations of those systems will also be in contention for the fastest.
If that is our autanamous stratagy...
Good Luck!!!
-Andy