Video of This Year's Highest Scoring Robots

[jspatz1]

Originally Posted by gblake

When you can't see something easily from the driver station (like a soccer ball hiding behind a Breakaway Bump), a complicated, expensive, hard to implement and hard to debug solution is a digital video camera beaming pictures to a driver. Another complicated one is using a camera and computer-vision software to detect soccer ball shapes on the field.

However, within the limited confines of the field, an elegant, simpler alternative might be a simple, shiny, flat piece of metal (a mirror).

If you come across some elegant solutions to that hidden ball problem...

Funny you should mention that! We had this same revelation in Atlanta. Our driver was sometimes ignoring easily obtainable balls because they were behind the bump out of his view. We realized we simply needed a mirror on the front so he could see them. An evening run to the baby department at Target yielded the perfect mirror....and oval, plastic, parabolic mirror that gave a wide angle view of the area in front of the robot (we decided to remove the cute stuffed elephant that was around it.) We had it on by mid-day Friday, and our driver reported it helped him several times. Here's a pic: