Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver
I'll throw this out there. It has already been noted that with the 2can box a basic drive train only robot can be created. Why not serialize the whole thing and take the heavy duty expensive brain and FPGA out of the robot? Isn't this the strategy Microsoft was pushing with the robotics studio environment? In other words, we would use a laptop with what ever power a team felt necessary as the main brain. The lap top would take user input through the USB ports,and do all of the processing. Command and status packets would be transmitted over wifi as we have now. The 2can can be expanded and maybe have a pair of can ports and some usb. There are usb servo boards with 20 pwm on them. Next add a usb or can solenoid driver board, a digital io board and an analog board. Other than maybe having problems with zillion cpr encoders, everything that we have now is there. In other words get everything back to a PC and do the crunching there. Now you have an Intel/AMD/Nvida platform to host the operating system and do the processing. The cost of the individual boards would be well under 200$. The cost of the 2can would go up . There are companies providing boards like this for the Microsoft robotics studio and .net frame work already.
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(I really don't know the answer to this question.) Could that have any impacts on processing speed if all sensor inputs needed to go through the wireless? I'm specifically thinking of stuff like tight feedback loops. (I know you can plug encoders directly into the Jaguars, so I guess that wouldn't be a problem, but it seems like you might need more complicated feedback loops that wouldn't be accounted for by that.)