Tactical information?

[RyanCahoon]

Originally Posted by nathanww

IMO, a standardized field information system would actually provide a lot more room for innovation. Right now, any team that wants to do something like your trackball-tracker has to develop it from scratch. [...] you end up spending all your time on the low-level sensor stuff, and not enough time on actually developing system that can use that data.

Two responses: a lot of low-level sensor routines can be developed in the off-season. Task-specific data-mining routines, on the other hand, would most likely have to be developed during the season; unfortunately, this does include vision classifiers like track ball trackers. I agree that this is a challenging task, and if your team wants to make an effort to do it, would probably require several years of pre-planning, and a whole team of programmers who work well together. Not impossible, but quite hard especially given the time frame. FIRST knows this, which is why they don't require it of teams.

Originally Posted by Burmeister #279

even if you put a super computer on the field it can't make decisions based on what your alliance members say or ask of it, only what it sees.

+10 brownie points for the team that develops natural language process for their FIRST robot

Originally Posted by Burmeister #279

Innovative? yes, but fun? not even for the programmers. Plus its asking a lot of FIRST and its FMS.

Exactly my point: no fun if FIRST has already done all the programming for you.

Originally Posted by nathanww

That would be the point of using data from the FMS or using human drivers as "sensors"--your tactical data isn't neccesarily limited by your robot's on-board devices or its physical location.

If you're already using humans as sensors, why not use them as processing as well? You save a lot on having a less complicated interface and humans are way easier to program...

Originally Posted by nathanww

You don't need a full AI, you need a domain-specific expert system, since it doesn't need to do anything else other than play whatever the game of the year is. The ability of an expert system to control the robot is also going to depend on the game of the year--for example, since we had such a simple strategy for Overdrive(go as fast as we can aroun the track, avoiding stuff)

Yes, Overdrive was a computationally easy game. I joked with the other programmers on my team that we could probably develop a fully autonomous system if we had a little more time, obviously you're one-upping us and actually going for it, for which I congratulate you. Note, however, that not all games are this easy. Considering that even the best research institutions have yet to develop domain-specific expert systems for operating vehicles in relatively-controlled environments (aka autonomous cars. And no, DARPA Urban Challenge wasn't realistic road conditions), you'll be hard pressed to develop one that has to evade 5 other machines in a considerably small space.

Originally Posted by nathanww

Most likely a system of "match priorities" set before each match. This would basically be a weighted table that the robot stores which determines how much a particular event occuring influences the action that the robot takes in response.

Yes this would probably be the easiest part, IMO. It becomes an exercise in game programming, i.e. glorified Chess Master. That would actually be rather fun to program, but would require quite a lot of computing power.

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

This is very similar to what is done in autonomous soccer competitions.

I'm going to go with this for a sec. If instead of the FMS just handing you the information that says "robot here, robot here, field element here, ..." teams were given an overhead image of the field, I think that would be rather realistic. Essentially it could be thought of as a shared aspect of all the robots on the field, since there are usually rules that would restrict a team from making a small detachable UAV a part of their robot. I would personally love to see this in a FIRST game in the near future. Would make a pretty wicked angle to show to the audience as well. Hey GDC, you have my vote.

--Ryan