pic: The new driver station

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

W! W! A! No, no go D! Now S!

In all honesty, anyone who regularly plays a FPS on the PC would probably be able to do most, if not all, of the driving and control by his/herself.

I'm a fan of creating a custom GUI in Java that not only displays whatever feedback but also provides advanced situation-based options for robot control. Then the Java would output commands via ethernet to the controller. Using Java3D you could even integrate whatever animations you've made in 3dsMax or Autodesk into the GUI.

Or you could use Matlab toolboxes that dynamically calculate GA's or other such "AI" based upon sensor feedback and output new PID coefficients for whatever functions. After a couple of iterations, who knows, an AI may even be able to "learn" the different styles of each driver.

Bah, I'm just rambling. It's nice to have a vision though.

[Racer26]

Wow... if the dashboard capabilities had enough throughput, mount a tri-axial turret on the top, with a camera on the end of it. basically turn the laptop into an FPS, mouse moves the turret in 2 axes, q and e in the 3rd axis, wasd to move the holonomic drivebase, and you feed the camera out onto the laptop screen... crosshairs in the middle of the screen, adjusted so that clicking the mouse fires a (ball, tshirt, whatever) perfectly for the crosshaired target... Cool.

EDIT: On second thought, your turret only needs 2 axes... though q and e could be used to rotate the drivebase.