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Unread 05-16-2010, 07:31 PM
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Re: Making autonomous accessible to all teams

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nadav Zingerman View Post
There is no doubt that sensors are useful in robotics (I would define a robot without them as a "machine", not really a "robot"), but you can't over-simplify things too much. NXT-G suffers from this a great deal; and creating anything more complicated than very simple sequential instructions (with the occasional decision making) is a pain. I'd hate to see that happen in FIRST.
I'm not suggesting using a different environment. I'm just suggesting alternate frameworks that make control easier.
For example, with this framework I made, any action can be started or stopped with any of the following conditions:
  • immidiately
  • time delay
  • time in match
  • named value =, <, or >
  • named input =, <, or >
  • Completion of another action
  • Sucess of another action
This allows dynamically sequential actions, but prevents race conditions (actions are isolated by their mechanism). It's very flexible, but allows many common actions to be easily implemented.

However, this is just one method of abstracting autonomous control, and surely not the only method. I think the sorts of control people want to do are similar enough that they can be all part of a generic framework, and then programmers can start transitioning from preplanned actions to dynamic action planning.
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