Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug Leppard
What is close? And did you succesfully target and shoot at that range?
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I'll say that the software was successful enough -- the ghosted targets were at the proper locations when we were within about 3 feet, which was all we were hoping for with the state of our shooter anyways. 50% miss rate, though I don't necessarily blame that on the software...I'm sure the targets were in the right places (range & bearing) on the radar screen.
The Java radar screen on our laptop allows the second driver to follow targets around with the turret, with a cursor representing the turret bearing and shooter speed. There isn't much automation in it due to the fact that it is more difficult than our capacity & timetable allow to create automated tracking algorithms. So it is up to the second driver to lead the shots on moving targets. He was getting decent practice with it Saturday, but we didn't have enough time to tweak it.
Unfortunately, judges don't believe the screen is good enough for an award because of its lack of automation. 90% of their questions were geared towards automation and accuracy of the target tracking system. Forget the fact that we did some pretty technical processing & re-wrapping of data in between the camera, cRIO, DS, and laptop, or the fact that we use a closed-loop turret tracking algorithm, or the fact that we used a standardized DoD System of Systems approach to the whole thing. We'll have to make an animation and presentation for all of that stuff one of these days...