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Unread 29-03-2004, 13:27
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miketwalker miketwalker is offline
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Re: Infared in Next Year's Game

Quote:
Originally Posted by dlavery
Dead reckoning systems are wonderful - as long as you know where everything is located, and can predict with reasonable accuracy how well your robot will navigate. But what happens if your target location is imprecisely identified?

Line following systems are great - as long as the lines lead to where you want to go. But what happens when they don't?

Sooner or later, robots must make the leap from structured to unstructured environments. The only way to do that is to rely on sensor systems that do not require fiducial marks or calibrated hard points to guide the machine.
I'd personally like to see a GPS-like system. Just 2 or 3 beacons around the field that robots can use to assist in positioning. Then teams can use that in conjunction with other sensors to find the "imprecisely identified" targets, which if they're moving or something similar... it will make it a fun autonomous mode. I'd like to see a system where you must rely on more than one system like you said. Not just infrared sensors, or just dead reckoning, but sort of a mix (maybe you need to get to a certain point before your in a line of sight with the infrared sensor due to a wall/obstruction in the way at the beginning?) I'd love to see a really good challenge in autonomous... and have enough points devoted to it that teams will spend more focus on it... because I know that's why we haven't put too much emphasis into autonomous, there's just not enough value in it to do anything crazy... but if multipliers or something come back for doing something in autonomous... or even autonomous at the end of a match.

For example, I know one thing I really would love to see is where teams can choose when to go in autonomous. So, if say they want to be in autonomous the last 30 seconds of a match, they get a certain amount of points... however other teams don't necessarily go in autonomous as well, so it's like.. the robot literally has to be able to think and counteract what the other team drivers may do.. but if you can do it well... you'd be very well rewarded, making a very interesting twist to the game. So maybe something like... for every second you stay in auto (if you exit auto before the end of the match it voids though unless you restart it and if you restart it you only get counted for the last bit). Just an idea I've played around with in my head the past few months.
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