FRC Game in 2009

[davidf]

I am new to first, however I have been using LabView for a while at my job and I have a few things to say about it.

1) It is an extremely powerful development environment. Programming in LV may take a while to learn, however once you understand the programming structure, it is much faster to do complex tasks then a similar C or C++ application is.
2) The FRC version of LabView is not, from what I can see, limited, and includes several expensive toolkits including NI Vision.

You are basically limited by hardware constraints and your imagination only. For my work (electrical engineering, RF) I have used labview quite extensively. It would be relatively simple to create a program that searched for objects of various shapes, sizes or colors. It would not be much harder to drive up to them and get a closer picture. Perhaps read a sign and follow its instructions (OCR vi's come in NI Vision that make character recognition straight-forward) or do some complex pattern recognition to sort objects into categories from the field.

Some limitation will be camera focus - I'm not sure if the camera for 2009 supports controlling focus via software - which would be necessary for reading close up text, barcodes, etc.

I know that building a FRC "robot" is challenge enough when it is remotely operated - but I think LabView will make autonomous actions much more feasible and maybe someday FRC will become an all autonomous competition.

For those of you who don't know it: The robot can be programmed remotely via the driver station and a laptop. This also means you can build a frontend on the laptop, e.g. any kind of control station you want on the laptop to give visual feedback or run pre-programmed drive loops or whatever the rules allow. Out of the box you can start a new LV benchtop vi that lets you see what the camera sees and all the analog, digital, pwm, and battery states directly on a laptop.

And perhaps next year when they enable the advanced functionality of the motor controllers-you will be able create feedback loops-and combine this with internal and external sensors (think gyroscopic sensor + accelerometer) and you can have much greater motor control, similar to what is used by Honda and others to build walking, upright android robots.

This kit your receiving is very much a professional, industry standard setup, if you go into electrical engineering / control systems engineering, you can expect to see much of the same software and equipment at your job.