Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[efoote868]

You know that DARPA ran its challenge twice before a team even completed it?
The challenge was (arguably) more straight forward: get your unmanned vehicle around a 150 mile track.
Teams also sunk large sums of money into the project, they also had a year to prepare beforehand.


I say this because having a fully autonomous robot may be *impossible* in 6 weeks, unless of course your team can come up with a 469 strategy.



In 2007, another programmer and I were able to make the robot *nearly* autonomous - the drive team only had to drive the robot to tubes, and drive the robot to the rack. The robot took care of controlling when the gripper mechanism opened (to grasp a tube), the robot took care of raising the tube to the dedicated height (level 1, 2, or 3 for the rack), and the robot sensed when the rack was within scoring distance (and shut, then released accordingly). After the tube was scored, the driver would back away, and the robot's mechanism would go down to the bottom level, and the wheels to grab the tubes would start spinning again.

This took two veteran programmers two weeks to accomplish, and the robot still wasn't fully autonomous.




My advice:
Do as much as you can in your robot, mask as much of the work as you can from the drivers, and you will have a successful time on the field. The less the drivers have to think about, the faster and better they can think about it.


To all yous looking to complete this challenge, good luck!