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[DPRG] Black Paper Floor - Worth Keeping?
Subject: [DPRG] Black Paper Floor - Worth Keeping?
From: DeltaGraph at aol.com
DeltaGraph at aol.com
Date: Sat Dec 16 11:01:15 CST 2006
Jeff, how dare you challenge the white lines on black paper!
The WHITE LINES serve to create a qualification for a run and shall remain
forever!
I suggest that Jeff Koenig be banned from the club.
Now with that said, I do like the proposal that David Anderson made at the
October meeting which is to do a contest using a few markers -- skipping the
walls and the lines on paper.
For those who are not local / did not attend October meeting, David (best I
can recall) proposed two contests in place of Quick Trip and Tee Time.
1. Drive out a given distance (within some tolerance) then return to start
point. Radial distance of stop point from start point would be your score.
Lowest score wins.
2. Drive a square pattern of a given size passing by each of three way
points then returning home (fourth point). Here again the radial distance from
start point would be your score.
The point in these contests is to encourage the use of odometry -- a very
useful skill in creating nifty robots that can do cool things.
The point in driving a square pattern is that you can use the UMBmark test
to diagnose errors in your robots odometry (David's presentation at the
meeting). So the idea is kind of neat that a contest parallels a good method for
improving odometry.
_http://www-personal.umich.edu/~johannb/Papers/paper60.pdf_
(http://www-personal.umich.edu/~johannb/Papers/paper60.pdf)
I would be in favor of placing a marker at each way point that could be
targeted if desired or bumped out of the way. For the indoor contest, I would
propose something like an orange soda can be placed on a marker taped to the
floor. That would make it easy to determine if robot passed within a given
distance of the can or struck the can. Taping target circles to the floor would be
more complicated I think -- just me talking here.
(Really knocking the can out of the way would be fun to watch)
Certainly wall following benefits from having the course walls, but no paper
floor would be needed for that contest. The 12' tee makes it easy to
transport a set of course walls for that contest.
Line following is still popular, but it is pretty easy to layout and roll up
that course.
I think -- of course -- it would be important to see/hear from anyone with
ideas, but let the folks who are going to build the robots or volunteer to run
the contest have the real say.
I hope the club would agree on some general goals in contest design:
1. Easy to Set Up.
2. Easy to Judge.
3. Entertaining
#3 might be best addressed by multiple robots running at a given time -- a
little less order in the world please! The most fun I ever had running my
robot was at the annual BBQ when it was in a pen running with two other robots
and a human controlled RC car. It was chaos -- fun!
All 3 points would encourage more contests, IMO.
Personally seeing robots run (at a contest) got me sucked into the club.
Running robots at meetings is probably a good idea to do the same thing.
We need a meeting area that gives us that ability -- for smaller robots at
least.
Ron Grant
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