Hello everyone,
First year mentor with Team 2171 -- the Crown Point RoboDogs! Which means I'm still coming up to speed on FRC..
..
I would guess that since the announcement of the cRIO controller and LabView combination everyone has been busy trying to learn all you can about them (like me) .
While learning LabView, it occurred to me that somewhere I had this old PDF circa 1995. Its called "Mathematical Foundations of Navigation and Perception For an Autonomous Mobile Robot" by James L. Crowley.
Note: Since finding it on a dusty old backup CD, I've since gone out to Google and discovered its widely available, so I believe this can be considered public domain information and is not subject to copyrights. Still, to respect copyrights, I've decided to include a link (below) to it rather than uploading the document itself.
It is a very readable text that describes a software/hardware architecture that uses Kalman filtering to guide the motions of an autonomous robot.
Keep in mind that when James L. Crowley built his robot and wrote this paper, he did not have a lot of the benefits that we at FIRST now have. For example, we have a well-defined game area, etc. Plus we have some really great sensors and LabView's mathematics libraries.
So, I was wondering if anyone would like to join together to collaborate on a summer project? Specifically, I was thinking about creating a vitual robot with LabView that can 'play' as much of the Overdrive game as possible using James L. Crowley's autonomous architecture. Athough the real purpose would be to learn more about LabView and methods of creating autobots, so the subject is open for discussion.
All the foundation work is done and provided in Labview's Robot Modeling and Simulation Toolkit. However, we would still need to build a Kalman filter, a mathematical model of the game area, etc. In short, we would be building the control logic for a robot that would be limited to the parameters we know from the Overdrive game. I'm not 100% sure, but I think LabView has all the tools we need to do this, we just have to figure out how to put them together so they work!
If you're interested, read the PDF (below). Then lets kick the ideas around and start building something with LabView. If we're not careful, we may learn something that will help our teams next year!!
Repectfully submitted,
KHall
PS -- Please do not assume that since I know of something, that I know how to do it. They are very different things!
http://www-prima.inrialpes.fr/Prima/...oundations.pdf