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Unread 30-07-2010, 08:19
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Chris Hibner Chris Hibner is offline
Eschewing Obfuscation Since 1990
AKA: Lars Kamen's Roadie
FRC #0051 (Wings of Fire)
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Re: Preparing CS students for the Robotics Revolution

Thanks again, Blake, for the wonderful simulator. I read the thread in your link, and I'm impressed at the direction things are heading.

For the topic of this thread: To get students more into the "brains of the robot" side of the project, we need to get more teams involved in various forms of automatic control other than simple timed motor commands. Whether the automatic control is in autonomous mode or during teleoperated mode to relieve the drivers of some tedious tasks, it's still useful and a good learning opportunity. The problem is that: a) feedback control takes some time to learn and understand, b) experimenting with feedback control on a live robot takes a long time and can be dangerous (and make for some costly repairs), and c) the robot is almost never ready in time to allow interested team members to experiment and learn.

It's my opinion that in order to get teams more involved in using control strategies, a good simulation platform is needed. This would allow the teams to come up with control strategies, implement the algorithms, and test them in the virtual world - all in parallel to the mechanical team designing and building the real robot. This would provide a safe learning environment for the controls people and it would give the rest of the team some confidence that the control strategies will work once the robot is finished.

I think we're getting much closer to having simulation capability in FIRST. Thanks again to Blake for everything that's come so far.
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