Probably already covered, but curious, Dead-reckoning or no?

[Dave]

Line tracking is hard. 3 out of 10 grad students at Carnegie-Mellon had trouble with it. It 'aint easy. However, apparently there's a lot of "backlash" in the gears, so dead-reckoning won't be quite accurate. possibly counting shaft revolutions and/or time can give semi-accurate location and speen input.
Line-following with a slowish (but still good) processor aint to good either... it would take 4/60ths of a second for the signal to get to the first processor anyway... and that's a long time. So, what are some ideas out there?

[Harrison]

Add an option for both.

We plan on going to the competition with a few programs. Then depending on who we're playing and what they're doing, we'll chose which program to run.

Some will be using the sensors, some will be dead-reckoning.

We'll be using the sensors if we are planning on going after a stack of human player boxes, but if we are planning on getting up the ramp to boxes, we'll be dead-reckoning. I don't trust that line on the ground (plus as mentioned the processing time is too long) AND, there is no white line on the ramp.

[wwrye]

there is no white line on the ramp, but as pointed out in team update 2 there will be an aluminum ramp support the is "very reflective" that continues up the ramp. Adjacent ramp supports will be painted black.

[Dave]

Yeah, we plan on programming for two options, as you can have three program sets in the stamp... if you twiddle with the dial on the back of the sensors, our test show it can differentiate between red, white and grey (picking out white) the metal, however, reflects approximately the same (or possibly more) infrared than the white... so on the ramp it gets kinda wierd...
maybe our tests were a bit off.
oh well...
hee hee.... why am I typing so early?