Complete Autonomous Robot

[BBray_T1296]

I dont think location awareness would really be impossibly difficult, but certainly one of the "easiest" challenges of a fully autonomous robot. (remember easiness is relative)

Hardware: you could use a revolving camera or other sensor such as a complex laser range finder (like you use on boats). On your processing computer (cRIO, some open source board, or a laptop) you process the data like this:
-You have some sort of computer model of the game field (like CAD).
-You have a 360 degree data field of distances of the closest object to you.
-You know how high your sensor is off of the ground
-You would have to throw out some data such as nearby robots as interference, but that might not be as hard as it sounds.
The computer would basically have to compare the range data it receives to the field structure file to find its exact location, like a piece to a puzzle (Use 2013 for example, if you know there is a wall to your left, and a vertical post to your right, you know you are next to the pyramid.

This system would not be the only source of location awareness. There is some degree of dead reckoning to be used as well. Your robot starts knowing it is roughly in your auto position, and fine tunes it to what it exactly sees around it. you don't have to rely on a gyro for rotation because with your range sensor you know the post is to the robots front (by an encoder on the revolving sensor), so you are facing the pyramid. Knowing your robots heading and speed you can guess your next location, but double check and fine tune it based on your advanced data.

Factoring out piece and robot interference to the system can be done since at another stage of the operation you have to know where the pieces and bots are anyways, so you can ignore data from that direction.

Think of how experimental robotic vehicles are working. They are tackling these same challenges and succeeding this very second. While Google's self driving cars don't have to track Frisbees, they do have to identify and track other cars with us dinguses behind the wheel.

Would it be hard? Yes.
Would it be impractical? Probably.
Could it be done in 6 weeks? Probably not.
Is it innovative? Absolutely.