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Unread 21-08-2007, 17:06
Dave Flowerday Dave Flowerday is offline
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VRC #0111 (Wildstang)
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Re: New Robot Control System!

Quote:
Originally Posted by SgtMillhouse648 View Post
To the best of my knowlege, by West Michigan, the championship, and IRI, you're robot had excellent autonomous capabilities. Wouldn't it have been nice to have that in the beginning also?
You still missed my point. If we wanted it in the beginning we would have had it. The autonomous you saw at other events was implemented mostly in a single 5 hour fix-it window. The control system did not prevent us from implementing it before Midwest. We decided not to do it before then because it wasn't valuable enough, and we were right.
Quote:
If a completely new control system was brought into effect, with nothing similar to the current one, it could take much longer to get to where you could be had FIRST stuck with the current control system, in your case, maybe no autonomous, and the robot much harder to control.
I agree this is a possibility, and frankly if the new control system does not permit us to at least choose to use C then I will be highly disappointed (however more language options would be fantastic). As long as the designers of the new system don't do anything really ill-advised (like requiring the use of Labview [ugh]) then we should be fine. Remember, the 2007 rules did not permit you to reuse software that you wrote from prior years, so you can't really make the argument that changing systems would force you to rewrite stuff since that was already true this year. Sure, Kevin's stuff would need to be replaced, but I'm sure he or someone else in the community would be right on top of that.

As empirical evidence, in 2003 we implemented this awesome little autonomous system that tracked our robot's position on the field and allowed us to literally draw out our autonomous routines in a GUI. It worked wonderfully, even course-correcting when other robots would bump into it. This system was written in PBASIC (with only 90 bytes of RAM and 16K of EEPROM!) and HC08 assembly. In 2004 they released the C-based controllers and we switched to C on our custom circuit as well. Re-implementing this system on the new setup was a breeze compared to doing it in PBASIC and allowed us to do many new things that we couldn't before. In 2003 there were only a handful of teams capable of something like that. Now, there are dozens of teams trying to recreate what we did back then. And many base their work on a presentation that we put together describing our 2003 system, which talks about the algorithms we used which are just as applicable today as they were in the days of PBASIC (see Alan's post above).
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