Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[Radical Pi]

If I were doing this, my first project would be a defensive robot. It is actually the simplest to code IMO. Just take the camera image, do a color analysys to find a rectangle of the opposing team's color, and drive towards that. Once you factor in a pinning timer through an accelerometer to determine if you are still moving, you could probably have a decent autonomous defensive robot.

Next would be the offensive ball collector. I personally would think of using an array of IR sensors that can give you a rough map of what is in front of you. Finding roundish-objects would be a bit of a challenge on the cRIO, but a fun one at that (would it be possible to generate a rough IMAQ image to use the existing libraries?). Alternatively, if a team could use a second camera, they could mount one high for targeting and one low for an ellipse detection below the bumper for balls.

Once you have possesion of the ball, I think the rest would be fairly easy. Do a spin until you detect a target, do a color check below the target to make sure you are aiming at the right team (180 spin if wrong), and then the rest has been done by other teams this year.

Sensor-wise, I think a gyro is a given. If you zero it after every targeting calculation, you could easily use it for relative motion in targeting through a state machine. I think flow would be camera detection->calculate turn amount->zero gyro->turn->when finished, re-check targeting and repeat if necessary. After a gyro, I think 2 cameras would be much more valuable than most other sensors. As I said before, a high camera has been proven to be acurrate for goal targeting. A low camera (kicker level?) could work using another ellipse detection algorigthm. Against the field, the balls would definitely have enough contrast to detect, but the field walls I'm not sure about.

On top of the cameras, some form of possession detection would be good. For our system, we mounted 3 IR sensors around the ball entry area. 1 sensor above the ball indicates when a ball is in our kicker (would have used this for autonomous if we had time most likely), and then 2 sensors, one on the left of the ball and one on the right, tell us the internal position of the ball in the kicker. A similar system might work in the autonomous bot idea.

AI flow as of now in my idea: Spin randomly->check for balls, spin again until found->aim for nearest ball->drive until in possession->spin until goal found->check if is correct goal, spin around if not->aim for goal and kick->repeat

Input?

EDIT: one more thing: a compass wouldn't work too well in this situation. I would expect that as electromagnetic motors, a fair amount of drift would be seen in any compass operation, causing the accuracy of the compass to change depending on speed and direction of driving