Now that the rules allow for laptops to be utilized as an on-board system on the robot, will any of you utilize it? Well I know I will. Computer Imaging is going to eat up a lot of computation power. I am gonna look into CUDA and see if that will help with the image processing.
Now that it is the build season no time to slack off
I hope parallel processing is the answer to autonomous robots.
Possible Uses For A Laptop:
1.)Signaling system:
The screen can display the color of the tube that the robot needs.
2.)Computer Vision:
The laptop can bring in images captured from web cams and process the various objects on screen. To make things even easier, OpenCV can be used. Honestly, I do not have the guts to write the whole thing.
3.)Artificial Intelligence:
The laptop can crunch numbers and data to generate the best route to take to score or pick up an object. That can be either transmitted to the driver or the robot can carry out the assignment itself.
4.)Decoration:
You can just stick the laptop on the robot and have a screen saver of your team logo or some shout outs or something like that. I wouldn't be surprised if some team did that.
Anything else to add?
I think rovers on Mars are way cool but you won't get a crowd of enthusiastic participants cheering as they trudge 150 meters a day. - Andrew Schuetze [more] 
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