Using A PS3 With The cRio

[apalrd]

It'd take a lot of modification, far more than the usefulness it would provide.

Stuff it has:
Hard drive
Blu-Ray drive (biggest plus)
Large number of processor and graphics cores

Stuff you would have to take out
Blu-Ray Drive
Hard Drive
Cooling fans on CPU/GPU's (although these can be replaced with KOP fans)


What you would get in software if you did all of this:
A ridiculous amount of processing power. There is legitimately no way to use all of this on a robot, even with several camera's worth of vision processing. Plus the nVidia GPU cores would do hardly anything. You could use the GPU cores to generate a virtual model of your bot (in real time) with the sensor data vs actual (ghost model vs real model), and even probably a virtual playing field, even with no optimization at all, and not come close to running out of power (but this would take you forever to code)

What can you use on your robot, realistically?
Vision. That's about it. You can already do just about everything else on the cRio.

A PS3 would be way-overkill for the problem (vision). Look at the problem and find the simplest solution. Don't look at a solution and try to find a problem to solve with it. The simplest solution used to be the CMUcam. It worked well. The simplest solution still involves a co-processor (there's just not enough power in the cRio to reliably process vision data), just not one as big as the PS3.

About the FIRST rules: They are there for a reason.
PWM/Spike outputs from cRio: This is for safety. They can always disable your robot if it is out of control.
No wireless: They don't want a spectator in the stands driving the robot.
Motors: Exact same power per robot. You can't have more mechanical power then the other guy.
It is perfectly legal to have a co-processor as long as it does not drive outputs. This is for safety, it's not FIRST being super-strict. Although one has to wonder how a motor in a Blu-Ray drive would cause a safety issue, one also has to wonder why you would ever need a Blu-Ray drive. Same for the hard drive, the vibrations/impacts sustained during play probably wouldn't be good for it anyway.

Edit: After re-reading your original post, I see that you are still bent on fully autonomous.
Do you know why DARPA robots have 10 computers? Did you also know that many have far fewer (1-2)?
Have you ever heard of IGVC? They run an autonomous ground-vehicle competition in grass fields, with robots roughly the size of ours, and use 1-2 computers per robot. Most of that goes into vision.
The cRio is capable enough to handle the navigation and state-machines if it has the vision data processed separately. On a FIRST field, the navigation is purely 2d, so that simplifies things greatly. Then, its just up to having a co-processor reading the images, and determing data such as the distance forward, horizontal, and angle and feeding it to the cRio to navigate on. I completely agree that you need more processing to work with images, but the PS3 may not be the correct answer.