Navigation

[pauluffel]

As Sean brought up, there will be two large parts to navigation. A) Finding the Optimal Route for the entire journey and B) Avoiding smaller obstacles along that Optimal Route.

A)The Optimal Route. By using one of these Garmin topographical maps or a similar map, we could create a program to determine possible paths based on specifications such as extreme altitude changes over short distances, waypoints, and the boundaries. This program should simplify these infinites paths into several unique paths, then rate these paths on difficulty to traverse (with determining factors such as total distance to travel, altitude changes, and materials [i.e. a road would have a much lower difficulty than a path through sand]). During the race, the program would determine which of these paths would be easiest and whether or not it should switch from one path to another based on things like whether it had been damaged and needed a slower, easier path, or whether it could risk a more difficult path because it was shorter and the autobot had not had any trouble with obstacles so far (this would probably be a bugger to code, but I"m a mech, so I"m just throwing out ideas for you coders).

B)Obstacle Aversion. Using loads of sensors, the autobot wouldhave to get a fairly god idea of it"s immediate surroundings and decide based on that what the easiest path would be that would stay closest to the Optimal Route it was trying to follow on a whole.

Please add to, subtract from, divide, and conquer these ideas.