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Originally Posted by nic_radford
Aside from how this is actually done, the more interesting discussion is increasing teams at nationals. Obviously there is only some much bandwidth in the 900 Mhz spectrum for the radios, a reason FIRST uses for keeping nationals to smaller numbers (I don't know the entire details on this matter, but that's the gist of what I've heard). But if we were all using WIFI to talk to all of our robots.....hmm....Could y'all imagine! All the differnent fields such as Currie or Newton having different subnets and everyone's robot which all have IP addresses. Wow, we could have a lot of robots at nationals then. Just something to chew on.
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Just to clear up one misconception, the limit on the total number of teams at the Championship has to do with practical limiits of the facility, supporting logistics and staff to handle large numbers of teams while maintaining the Championship as a "quality event." The use of the 900MHz radios is a determining factor on the number of robots active on the fields at any one time, but does not impact the total number of teams participating in the event.
That aside, this work is absolutely kick-butt! I got some insights into how the comm link is set up last week (via Rob Ambrose), and it is pretty impressive. The idea of making every robot/RC independently adressable via a unique IP location really opens up a lot of potential for completely new ideas for interacting with the robots, off-board co-processing, massive potential for autonomy support, all sorts of new game designs (imagine a 30 on 30 on 30 game!),
real remote operations - imagine controlling the robot from another continent! - etc. Great work!
-dave