Is your team going to use a beacon tracker?

[bigqueue]

Originally Posted by Kevin Watson

Just out of curiousity, how many teams have successfully built and plan to use a beacon tracker during the competition?

-Kevin

Yes, we do have a beacon tracker.....it is a home design that we actually started two years ago. It is based on a rotating sensor picking up the IR off a 45 degree mirror.

We have it designed, prototyped and finally built/ We have the code written and working on the prototype. Out plan is to release the entire design and code to the FIRST community for their use. (we were sort of given the suggestion that the beacon detection might NOT be "optional" next year....)

Anyways, we understand the issue with reflections, so our software will be capable of tracking a large number of beacons, with a higher level piece of code (which we will also release) which does error detection to pull out the actual (real) beacons.

The output of the whole mess is an angle to the beacon from the direction the robot is pointing. (actually, it differenciates between the left and right beacon too)

We have two of these on our robot, and with each one triangulating to the two beacons, we think we can figure out exactly where we are on the field. (ha.....it works on paper anyways.....we'll see how it all comes together in practice)

Anyways, our intent is to post a whitepaper on it, release the designs (mechanical/CAD, schematics, BOM and code) and to have a seminar on the concept/design at the Manchester Regional. (and at the Nationals if we make it there)

We will be releasing information via our website very soon. (once we write it ;-)

If you are interested in what we are doing, you can email me.

-Quentin
(bigqueue_qlewis@yahoo.com)