2009 Control System Possibility?

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

Now I learned how to code in C pretty well, but any monkey can write code. What I learned that was much more important was the high level control law theory, which had implications on my decisions for college. I am willing to argue that high level concepts and implementations are what we should be pushing students in FRC to learn.

I've worked professionally on both very-high-level applications (Java apps on a desktop) and very-low-level apps (BSPs, bootloaders, etc. on embedded PowerPC platforms) and in my opinion, the best software engineers are those who have an understanding of BOTH sides. In college, the very first programming class I had to take started off with assembly - because they knew it was important to understand what was happening "under the hood" even if you didn't work directly on it every day. Frankly, I think the fact that my team is putting out a bunch of software students who have real experience working on embedded C code will put them leaps & bounds ahead in college and their jobs over those who only know Java, Python, VB, or LabView. People who understand embedded software are few and far between compared to the number of people who know how to work in higher-level software (in my experience) and therefore are more in demand.

But that's not really my point. All this whining about wanting to write code that simply tells your robot to "drive straight" - are you telling me the hardware we have now is not capable of this? I don't believe that's true - not even close. Now, there certainly are NOT plug-n-play solutions for driving straight, but this is a software library problem. If this was a problem that FIRST wanted to solve, why haven't they been working on this for the last several years? Volunteers like Kevin have been making inroads, but if this was a priority then FIRST could hire someone, or approach a university and ask them to develop it as a research project, or approach a company like Intellitek, or whatever.

You can drop a supercomputer on my robot and it won't drive any straighter than it does now unless someone also provides the software to make that happen. There's no reason that software can't exist on the current platform.