NEW 2009 Control System Released

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I think a lot of this angst and annoyance could have been taken care of if this system was closer to a prototype of the system going out to teams and farther from a demo piece put together by NI to sell us on the system. I know I would have been fine with more man hours spent on these TBD features and less man-hours spent on a pretty holonomic robot with a sponge canon and flashy interface that still on bears a resemblance to the environment and hardware we'll be working with.

As one of the people who helped design and build the "pretty holonomic robot", all I can say is that the new control system is still very much a work in progress. Those of us who built the "pretty holonomic robot" were mechanical and robotics engineering college students, who were tasked to design and build a robot to showcase some of the new features of the new control system.

Could was have hacked some prototype demo robot together a lot quicker? Yes. But the group of us who designed, machined, and built that robot take pride in our work, and were in no way taking time away from those who are actually developing the new control system.

I'm sorry you think that the extra ten percent of effort we went through to make our demonstration robot look nice was in some way hampering the control system development cycle.