What to do with autonomous

[Rickertsen2]

What are your plans for autonomous this year? Will you choose to track the IR beacon? If so, how do you plan on finding your ball without knocking over the opponent's? The beacon is in betwen the two?

Line tracking?

Dead reckoning based on timing?

Dead reckoning based on encoders?

Dead reckoning based on gyros and accelerometers?

Something else entirely?

Whatever is is you are doing, please explain.


Our team is doing an encoder based dead reckoning system somewhat similar to what wildstang did last year, only it is expected to be much more precise. We have a seperate PIC18F252 dedicated to nothing but counting encoder pulses and computing the trig transforms necessary to figure out where we are. We have figured out a rather clever way of doing trig functions extremely fast, but don't expect any leaks on that. The IFI processor will take the position data from the secondary processor, and run a rather complex control algorythm to make the robot follow preprogrammed paths.