Did Anyone Accept the Challenge?

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

I really have no experience, I believe that it can't be that hard in a such confined environment such as a FIRST game compared to the world. I was only planning on being defensive anyway.

It may be even harder. In "the world" it is often not a requirement to navigate around objects moving around at 10-15FPS.

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

It may be even harder. In "the world" it is often not a requirement to navigate around objects moving around at 10-15FPS.

Eh, true, but we won't need to be calculating realtime to compensate for uneven terrain or some other stuff like that. I see no reason why this will not be possible in 1 year.

[theprgramerdude]

I believe the challenge was a worth goal; it surely can be done given a small team of experience programmers with the drive to make something this awesome. However, this game doesn't really suit a full autonomous. Can someone here tell me exactly how complex the code would be to sense out all the tubes flying around the field, and differentiate them from the field, the arena, and other robots? Last year would've been a great game to try it with (not as many objects to deal with, and a more limited space at any given time). This year would just be hell if you have anything less than 10 or 15 sensors, including all the code required to operate them all effectively.

[Geek 2.0]

Perhaps we should try a new goal, maybe for off-season events. I doubt we will be able to do this, but I would love to see someone give it a shot.

What if the challenge were not a fully autonomous bot, but rather a MOSTLY autonomous bot? lineskier put forth a good idea, by telling the robot to "FIND TUBE" and "CAPTURE TUBE", etc. Obviously, if it misinterprets, the error will just rack up and there will be problems on problems.

To avoid this, give the driver two buttons: "Success" and "Failure/Retry". If the robot succeeds in the command it's given, you tell it "Success". If it fails, you tell it to retry.

To be really impressive, have it learn from failure. Yeah, that sounds difficult, but it's possible, and not as complex as you might think. If it grabs the wrong color, have it tweak it's color detection settings. If it went the wrong way, tweak the heading.

So, what do you think? Anyone willing to take up the challenge? (Like I said earlier, unfortunately our team won't be able to do this yet, but maybe in the future).

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Geek 2.0

Perhaps we should try a new goal, maybe for off-season events. I doubt we will be able to do this, but I would love to see someone give it a shot.

What if the challenge were not a fully autonomous bot, but rather a MOSTLY autonomous bot? lineskier put forth a good idea, by telling the robot to "FIND TUBE" and "CAPTURE TUBE", etc. Obviously, if it misinterprets, the error will just rack up and there will be problems on problems.

To avoid this, give the driver two buttons: "Success" and "Failure/Retry". If the robot succeeds in the command it's given, you tell it "Success". If it fails, you tell it to retry.

To be really impressive, have it learn from failure. Yeah, that sounds difficult, but it's possible, and not as complex as you might think. If it grabs the wrong color, have it tweak it's color detection settings. If it went the wrong way, tweak the heading.

So, what do you think? Anyone willing to take up the challenge? (Like I said earlier, unfortunately our team won't be able to do this yet, but maybe in the future).

This is definitely my first goal. However I don't have a swerve drive, which would be my first requirement for this project...

Once I raise the money I'll be putting together a 4-speed swerve drive. it wouldnt need an arm at first. It would simply drive to a tube, and then drive to the peg column where that tube would be worth the most.

Ideally such a task would be accomplished by 2 separate teams... one for the drive, one for the arm. So work could be done in parallel rather than in series.

or even better 3, adding in a team for the vision system, as it would dictate to the drive and arm.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by theprgramerdude

I believe the challenge was a worth goal; it surely can be done given a small team of experience programmers with the drive to make something this awesome. However, this game doesn't really suit a full autonomous. Can someone here tell me exactly how complex the code would be to sense out all the tubes flying around the field, and differentiate them from the field, the arena, and other robots? Last year would've been a great game to try it with (not as many objects to deal with, and a more limited space at any given time). This year would just be hell if you have anything less than 10 or 15 sensors, including all the code required to operate them all effectively.

Actually I believe this year would be easier than last year for several reasons:

The pegs are easier to see than the targets.
The pegs relate more information than the goals.
The tubes are easier to see than balls.

Fully autonomous would help if you had a full alliance involved in the cause. I think an autonomous capper could be faster than a human capper, so if you had a team dedicated to delivering tubes, and your only job was to cap them I think you could get the average down to about 10 seconds per find and cap by staying in your endzone.
One thing I've noticed a lot of is alliance partners bumping into one another. By putting an autonomous robot on one rack, and having one runner, i think it would free up quite a bit of the field.

Again you wouldn't want to try to watch the tubes flying around, but tubes on the ground are certainly detectable as the are large and have specific shapes. Open CV contains some shape matching libraries that could help there. You would drive around scanning for a tube that was on the field.