New Sensors?

[Jared Russell]

New sensors for new sensors' sake will just be a gimmick that very few teams end up using successfully (like the camera has been in many years). There would need to also be a game mechanic that requires the new sensor.

I would personally love to see an end-of-match autonomous mode, which necessitates very good localization. Up until now, teams could get by on using odometry from a known starting position and be (reasonably) repeatable over 10-15 seconds. Remove the ability to precisely control the initial conditions of the robot and it is a whole different animal.

Robocup uses a top-down, whole field camera as previously mentioned. This might be infeasible, but attaching a high resolution camera (with high intensity LED rings) rigidly to a goal or field element would be really, really cool. The field would then send the images over wired Ethernet to the player station and would let teams detect their own robot in the video stream on the driver's station. You could then do localization (or even visual servoing) based on the feed and send commands to the robot.

Advantages of this proposal:
0) Robots that can work from semi-arbitrary starting conditions would be HELLA COOL.

1) Since 2005, the vision challenge has always been to detect a given feature of the field or game element. Instead, turn the challenge on its head and let teams have to devise their own fiducials (using retroreflective tape or otherwise). Designing good features to detect, localize, and track is a tough engineering challenge!

2) Field WiFi network doesn't need to carry image data, so no bandwidth hiccups and latency problems like we've seen for the past few seasons.

3) Teams don't need to worry about mounting a camera to their robot (expensive, complex, occasionally flaky, fragile, etc.).

4) Teams only need a sensor and a laptop to do the programming. Gives the programmers a meaningful task on day 1!

A variation on this proposal would be to have a protected area of the field/beside the field (with ethernet cables and power supplied) where teams can position their own custom camera (or other) sensor prior to the match. This eliminates the need for every team to acquire one of the official field sensors and could allow for even more creativity.