Quote:
Originally Posted by Studentish
Do you think that using Statistical Analysis based on the bell curve is an innovative and/or efficient way to implement targeting control?
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Are you actually saying statistically-based algorithm or probabilistically-based algorithm? Statistically-based algorithms have been used by FIRST teams for a while, in the form of look up tables (I know several of the teams last year used similar things for ramping speed in autonomous and even for position control for knocking off track balls).
The ones that really interest me, and that I want to encourage my teams to start using since we have the power of the new control system, is
probabilistic robotics, which is doing real-time analysis to calculate the probability of the robot being in any of several states instead of just using heuristic-based, "yes you are or no you're not," types of algorithms.
If this is the type of thing you're doing, I'd really like to hear more about it. Realistically, though, it's not that hard to do some of this type of thing with vision. I.e. you first do thresholding and then particle analysis, which gives you back several blobs, and you have to decide which one to track; in our experimenting, 1708 decided to use the size of the blob, as that is generally proportional to proximity to the robot. Note that this could be called probabilistic robots, because essentially we're assigning a probability to each blob that is the closest based on how big the blob is, because we don't know for sure, but larger blobs are more probable to be closer. Then we pick the largest blob - taking the blob with highest probability - as the one that we should "probably" track. You essentially have to do this with any algorithm that is analyzing data from a sensor.
The next step comes when you start interpolating data based on relative accuracy-probability from multiple sensors in order to estimate a higher state (for example is my
DARPA Urban Challenge robot still on the road?). According to Thrun, Burgard, and Fox, this is the future of robotics and I'm inclined to agree.
--Ryan