|
About navigation...
All of these ideas about using GPS are great because it gives you the information in a nice preformatted way, but the other ways might be more stable and reliable. In order to make the best possible competition autobot, there needs to be redundency in the naviagation methods by using several of methods to find location. The ones I like...
1. GPS - nice and clean, it directly gives you your position
2. Visual Landmarks - find path rather than direct position by using pre0set landmarks.
3. Compass - use a digital-output compass and an odometer and plot course (remember boyscouts? <not to exclude all the female engineers here, but I have no experience with girlscouts>
My favourite is the third because it relies on the earth rather than satellites, so it"s base for positioning is more stable. The only dillema is that the odometer could be wrong and thus the positioning would be completely off and the autobot would get more wrong as it progressed.
As to locomotion...
It must be a ground vehicle, but it would be much more agile if it had something to augment its wheels. It would probably be difficult, but it would be really cool to have some sort of explosive propulsion on it to (kind of like a MechWarrior 'jump-jet' or the StarFox64 tank that could get a little bit off the ground to overcome obstacles.)
looks like a bit more than $2/100, so my unofficial opinion appraises it at $.46
|