[Official 2005 Game Design] Autonomy Discussions

[miketwalker]

I really am liking this maze game idea. I think it would be a great idea if you had something on top of this that you could do as well (which would mean teams would have to build under a certain height to fit in this maze.... and I think if the points were setup properly, the maze could be a very interesting twist).

Also, as Andrew said... I'd LOVE to see a changing field. I really enjoyed the dropping balls this year, but I would love to see things on the field change during autonomous everytime. For example, maybe a REALLY valuable object that for points is moved onto the field, but after autonomous it's pulled off and no longer able to be retrieved. Then you could incorporate your whole "IR beacon being forced to be used next year" scenario on this moving object.

I'm also a big fan of multipliers in autonomous. I really would like to see either at the beginning or end something similar to the 2001 game... where the sooner you go into autonomous (if at the end) or the longer you stay in it (at beginning) or maybe even a combination of the two (because you could run auto in the beginning, and see what happens during the match to decide when/if to go back into auto at the end) and this can give you valuable points.

I'd definitly like to see some type of system working with the field possibly to help teams position. Dead reckoning is a pain, and line tracking and IR beacon tracking are slow and tedious usually. I'd love to see some type of system on the field that could maybe act kind've like a GPS system where you read the location of these different beacons and can find your position. Like I said with the moving objects, you could use this GPS-like system to move near where this object would be at (I'm guessing things like that would be mid-field) and then you'd have to swap over to IR beacon to actually find the object's location. It would make autonomous more interesting, and with the GPS-like system... programmers could work AFTER the robot is shipped because as long as they know where their sensor is on the robot, they can code it for where to go without a robot, getting rid of some of the disadvantage that teams who have 2 bots have. This all could be incorporated with a maze-like idea as well, or maybe something else. There are some teams who have come up with how to do this already (I'm referring to WildStang's StangPS and I know several other teams have been making similar systems)... but for many teams it's way too difficult to do. I know I was working on a system this year, but with spacing in the robot I had no room to put the gyro wheels and things I needed for this system. Plus, I couldn't use anything in the kit really to do this, and our team's budget didn't allow for these little extra sensors that I'd need, even if we had had the room.

Overall... I really would like to see autonomous have LOTS of value next year and also be setup to where the robots can't just dead reckon or something. As George said, getting the 10 point ball this year was nearly impossible (Only team I know of that did it was Technokats at nationals one match I believe) and strategically it might not be what you want to do. But give that ball some points you can only recieve in autonomous... you'll see many more teams going after that ball.

My final thought is to allow alliance robots to literally "communicate". Perhaps another radio channel, I don't know. I think that if you had a communication between the robots with something like... maybe position or location of that mobile object. So, say the object is randomly moved around each match during autonomous... both can search for it and when one finds it relay to the other "Hey, it's somewhere in this area, here's my location and where I'm looking with my IR beacon" and the other robot can reroute it's autonomous to go to that area. Perhaps even knowing the location of ALL robots, whether on the same alliance or on the opposing. Robots could actually "think" and interact to the movements of the other teams and would have to constantly do a "What do I want to do." and at the same time the other robots will be doing that, so depending on how the robots react, each one will recalculate what to do... removing the "Wow, autonomous is repetitive and boring." scenario some people are talking about.

I know I just put in ALOT that would require a ton of designing and would probably be quite impractical in a money sense, but I've been thinking about it for awhile. Out of all of that, I've noticed with competitions and all my scenarios that a better positioning system is DEFINITLY needed to know absolute location by some type of system. The StangPS is a beautiful system for this, but it's just not practical for some designs. Like I said before, if we could make a like 3 "tower" system of radio beacons or something around the field to act like a GPS system... teams would be able to actually program after their robot is shipped and see their robot do what they told it to at competition... evening out the playing field for teams that can only build 1 robot.