look Ma, no OI

[Matt Krass]

Originally Posted by dlavery

Just to clear up one misconception, the limit on the total number of teams at the Championship has to do with practical limiits of the facility, supporting logistics and staff to handle large numbers of teams while maintaining the Championship as a "quality event." The use of the 900MHz radios is a determining factor on the number of robots active on the fields at any one time, but does not impact the total number of teams participating in the event.

That aside, this work is absolutely kick-butt! I got some insights into how the comm link is set up last week (via Rob Ambrose), and it is pretty impressive. The idea of making every robot/RC independently adressable via a unique IP location really opens up a lot of potential for completely new ideas for interacting with the robots, off-board co-processing, massive potential for autonomy support, all sorts of new game designs (imagine a 30 on 30 on 30 game!), real remote operations - imagine controlling the robot from another continent! - etc. Great work!

-dave

Does his enthusiasm for all those crazy crazy ideas scare anyone else?

Anyway, that looks nice, and about the CPU time/bandwidth/whatever. For one thing, FIRST already limits what we can send back as far as data goes, cameras too. The processing power to encrypt/decrypt WiFi could be handled by an external CPU managing communications too. About the packet collisions...hmm..no ideas there....anyone else?